[HN Gopher] Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC
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Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC
Author : KhoomeiK
Score : 140 points
Date : 2021-05-27 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.livius.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.livius.org)
| thedogeye wrote:
| Love that this page was created in 1996.
| etrevino wrote:
| As a data point in the story's favor: there was the Phoenician
| Ship Expedition (conducted in, I think, 2010) which
| circumnavigated Africa in a replica ship. I assume it managed to
| get past Cape Bojador because of the boat's shallow draft.
| sthnblllII wrote:
| This is just Herodotus' account. I don't see any new evidence
| here.
| sthnblllII wrote:
| This is just Herodotus' well known account right? I don't see any
| new evidence here, only an informed guess "reconstruction" of
| what the trip would have been like.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I'm skeptical. No matter how good the Phoenician sailors were, it
| seems unlikely to me that they could have blithely sailed past
| Cape Bojador[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador Maybe
| if they had small enough boats to stick close to the shore and
| portage.
|
| Seafaring on the Mediterranean is simply a lot less complex than
| it is on the open ocean. The European sailors were not able to
| pass this point till the 15th century CE; not saying they were
| better sailors, but that 2000 years later maritime technology was
| a lot better.
|
| [1] I put in footnotes to point out how stupid footnotes are on
| HN: just past the link into the text up above, it gets
| highlighted and works just fine.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| I'm currently reading Clive Pointing's 'World History - A new
| perspective'. >800 pages of well researched history with a
| large Eurasian focus (due to the availability of sources, not
| bias).
|
| He repeatedly makes the point that some technology that Europe
| 'discovered' in the 13-19hundreds was in fact known in china
| 1000+ years earlier. Most of recorded history Europe basically
| played no role whatsoever.
|
| A few examples that struck me, taken from his snapshot pages
| 'The world in xxxx' which are scattered throughout the book:
|
| 5000BCE * first smelting of copper in Anatolia and Elam
|
| 2000BCE * glass produced in south west asia * development of
| the chariot in southwest Asia and china
|
| 600BCE * first production of cast iron in china * iron working
| in west Africa
|
| 150CE * First use of paper in china * compass in use in china
|
| 600CE * 1200 mile long canal built in china * iron cables for
| suspension bridges in china * horse collar used in china *
| paper used in china and korea
|
| 750CE * first wood block printing in China
|
| 1000CE * vikings reach north America * first gunpowder weapons
| in china * paper money in china * horse collar used in europe
|
| 1200CE * multi-,colour printing in china * European ships adopt
| Chinese stern-rudder and compass
|
| ...
| sthnblllII wrote:
| With all these advantages, why did the industrial revolution
| happen in Europe instead of Asia?
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| With all these advantages, why did the mobile revolution
| happen with Apple instead of Microsoft?
| fsckboy wrote:
| I'm no expert, but China has much, much less arable land
| than Europe. Something needs to finance industrialization,
| and in preindustrial times, food was finance because that's
| what supported a growing population.
| gota wrote:
| Isn't that largely offset by cultivating a lot of rice,
| that being so much more efficient as a crop?
|
| What other things are at play, for example, in Japan's
| bonkers hight population across history?
| Hemospectrum wrote:
| The industrial revolution was as much a product of
| economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers
| hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come
| and gone without making much of a ripple. In fact, there's
| an argument to be made that it once did exactly that.
| Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen
| as a stupid novelty.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't know English history well enough to put
| together a better explanation, but I'm sure this has been
| the subject of a number of PhD theses. Maybe someone can
| point to a source that goes into better detail.
| kiba wrote:
| _The industrial revolution was as much a product of
| economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers
| hadn 't been nearly so high, the technology might have
| come and gone without making much of a ripple._
|
| The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the
| UK as it did is disputed by historians.
|
| I would argue that high wage, while important as an
| incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental
| reason why the industrial revolution happens.
|
| Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and
| continuous improvement must occur to a potential
| inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all
| despite continual pressure and despite available low
| hanging fruits.
|
| Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole
| category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive
| drives what gets invented and don't.
|
| _Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and
| seen as a stupid novelty._
|
| Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but
| toys. They can't do useful work.
| c06n wrote:
| You are completely ignoring philosophy. It was the ideas
| of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of
| equality of men, that made the whole enterprise possible.
| China had the tools, sure. But not the incentives. Their
| emperor could not let lose a zoo of creativity, for fear
| of destruction of the empire.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| That is a damn good question that historians still argue
| over today.
|
| The short version is that the Song dynasty appeared to have
| all the precursor technology needed for industrialization
| by the 12th century, but then just didn't. The most
| commonly held view is probably that society and economics
| is as important than technology, and that while they at
| that point had the kind of metallurgy that Europeans could
| only dream of until the late 18th century, what they didn't
| have was labor shortages and capitalism, which were what
| made industrialization something people wanted to actually
| do. But this is by far not the only proposed explanation.
|
| In general, because of the recent history of the west
| appears like it, I think we are far too predisposed to view
| of development as a linear progression towards something,
| that history has a direction, and that direction is up. For
| most of history, for most societies, this hasn't really
| been true. As many societies have spent as long stagnating
| or even regressing as have advanced. It's just that so long
| as _one_ advances, eventually it 's going to influence it's
| neighbors, either by taking them over or by having them
| frantically play catch-up to not be taken over, and so the
| whole thing has a direction.
|
| This leads to my pet theory for why Europe: Because Europe
| has managed for almost the entirety of it's history to
| avoid being conquered by a single empire, so everyone was
| always afraid of their neighbors, yet there was a solid
| enough foundation of international law that everyone wasn't
| at war with all their neighbors all the time. This created
| both a backdrop that forced states to push to be more
| powerful, even over entrenched interests, and the
| conditions where the best way to do this often enough
| wasn't beating up your neighbors and taking their stuff.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| This mentions the main problem is a sudden shift in wind
| direction, but would that cause the same issues coming from the
| south?
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Footnotes are useful to not break the flow of a thought with
| text that isn't meant to be read. Also, because of the link
| included at the end of a sentence, you were not able to include
| the conventional full stop immediately after the last character
| of the sentence.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Pedantic, off-topic comments also break conversational flow.
| ThalesX wrote:
| It also helps for comments with multiple links to have a
| footer with all of them.
| fsckboy wrote:
| we're going off topic here, but i always feel like comments
| like yours assume that I'm a complete idiot and don't know
| anything and need to be told something obvious :)
|
| what you say is so obvious, I'd prefer that you read your
| comment first as representing the generally held wisdom I'm
| arguing against, and then interpret my comment as a riposte
| to that. My point was that, and this applies to printed books
| also, what breaks up flow for me is to go searching for
| footnotes which by their nature are any place but handy. I'm
| a detail oriented person, and I want the illumination that
| extra detailed footnotes provide, and it doesn't distract me
| at all from what I'm reading--and especially not distracting
| with regard to a highlighted link
|
| your comment about the missing full stop points out exactly
| what I'm talking about: you give primacy to the rules of
| punctuation over the interesting thoughts being conveyed, the
| unique, human, creative part. I'll bet you just love C's
| semicolons? (actually, I do love C's semicolons, because I
| speak C, but I use it as an example because the average
| person finds them infuriating... and in any case, I actually
| LOVE when inserting an URL into text frees me from having to
| add a full stop someplace, whose purpose adds nothing to the
| information, it's simply a notional convenience to separate
| one notion from another) <-- see, that R-paren frees me from
| having to include a period! <-- but the exclamation is
| required
|
| and I threw in an em-dash up there to show that I also find
| emdashes--like this--much less distracting than parentheses
| (parentheses really make the aside take over your train of
| thought) in terms of figuring out where you are in the
| original paragraph
|
| (omg, downvotes for the most interesting thing you've read
| all day, something that points out a number of things you
| never thought of before? pioneers always die of arrows in the
| back!)
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I made no assumptions of your competency. What I said was
| obvious to me but, your comment indicated that you didn't
| understand why people use footnotes on HN. To effectively
| communicate ideas to the largest number of people it is
| necessary to follow conventions. Bucking convention reduces
| your possible audience size.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I think have higher standards for obviousness than you.
|
| My comment did not indicate that I don't understand
| footnotes, not here nor in books, that was something you
| read in. In fact, my comment indicated facility with the
| subject. A person unfamiliar with footnotes wouldn't even
| know to call them footnotes, and a person unfamiliar with
| how they are used on HN would not say "(a) I disagree
| with how they are used and (b) because links are
| highlighted to stand out they are not a distraction".
| What I just wrote there is obvious to me, why not to you?
|
| nobody knows at the beginning of a comment whether later
| in the comment conventions are going to be bucked, and I
| highly doubt in a 4 line comment whether inline links or
| footnoted links are going to make a difference to
| audience size, i mean seriously!
| ghaff wrote:
| I really like being able to use footnotes, which
| unfortunately don't work well with Kindle-style flowing text.
|
| I find it useful to explain some concept that _most_ readers
| probably know, to bulletproof ( "yes, I'm well aware there
| are one or two edge cases but they're really not relevant in
| general. Let's move on."), historical digressions that aren't
| important to the general point, and references. (Of course,
| if it's only references, those work fine as end notes.)
| eloff wrote:
| Fascinating. A passable route was discovered in 1434 by the
| Portuguese.
|
| > Examining the Pilot Charts for this area, however, it becomes
| clear that the main concern lies in the changes in winds that
| occur at about the point at which Cape Bojador is passed in
| sailing down the coast. It is here that the winds start to blow
| strongly from the northeast at all seasons. Together with the
| half-knot set of current down the coast, these conditions would
| naturally alarm a medieval mariner used to sailing close to the
| land and having no knowledge of what lay ahead. In the end it
| was discovered that by sailing well out to sea--far out of
| sight of land--a more favorable wind could be picked up.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Not a particularly good assumption to make imo.
|
| For example, we now have multiple solid lines of evidence that
| ancient Polynesians were making it all the way from Oceana to
| Peru, and back, with some degree of regularity. We see this in
| human genetics on both sides, as well as the introduction of
| the potato to Oceana. The Polynesians had a very different
| approach to navigation than europeans, one based on amassing a
| great deal of knowledge about currents, bird and sea life
| behavior, as well as intuitive celestial navigation.
|
| It seems likely the first folks to make this trip were forced
| into it via a storm or such, but what's stunning is it's clear
| some of them were able to map the path well enough to be able
| to find their way back home later. There are still some people
| who use these navigation skills today. Look up the maps they
| make with sticks and twine. They're pretty interesting.
|
| In any case, my point is there's historically been a lot of
| variation in sailing techniques and technology. If you looked
| at an ancient Polynesian proa, you'd almost certainly assume
| it's impossible they could cross such a vast distance. But they
| did. No doubt many drowned, but we know as an empirical fact
| some made it, and made it back.
|
| The ancient Phoenicians were brilliant mariners. They invented
| the trireme, the keel, the amphora, etc. It's easy to think of
| these as crude technologies, especially based on hollywood
| portrays, but the reality is these were the NASA astronauts of
| their era. Coordinating large number of rowers that are stuck
| in the hull and blind to their surroundings is not as trivial
| as it might seem.
|
| As another comment points out, triremes and similar vessels
| usually beach at night. The sailors are capable of dragging the
| things considerably away from the water line. In fact they have
| to do so relatively often to let the boats dry out for some
| number of days. Likewise we know of several places around the
| med where ships were dragged considerable distances over
| standardized portage/ferrying routes routinely.
|
| This is very different from the ships the Portuguese were using
| in the 1400s. Their ships were bigger, with deeper draft, and
| with rock ballast in the lowest hold for stability. They'd have
| a limited capability to use poles/oars to push themselves
| through shallows where they were partially dragging, but
| covering longer distances on land with such ships is infeasible
| without far more people. Combine that with an aversion to
| sailing out of sight of the coastline, and you can see why
| they'd face more issues in this area.
|
| In any case, I'm no authority on these topics, just another
| curious person on the internet, but I find it entirely
| plausible the Phoenicians simply walked their boats past this
| obstacle.
|
| Modern humans have an unfortunate habit of projecting our own
| perspective on labor onto ancient peoples. Humans are capable
| of truly astounding things with nothing more than their bodies
| when focused on a common goal for a sustained time. The best
| example is neolithic architecture. There was no magic trick to
| building Stonehenge. They just used a ton of people over a long
| time to drag the rocks there, and then sea saw them into
| position.
| wazoox wrote:
| Cape Bojador prevented travelling north to south for centuries,
| but south to north maybe not so much.
| narag wrote:
| _' m skeptical. No matter how good the Phoenician sailors were,
| it seems unlikely to me that they could have blithely sailed
| past Cape Bojador_
|
| You assume the coast was the same two milennia before.
|
| My hometown, a thousand km north, was in the coast two thousand
| years ago. Now it's 5 km inland.
| w0de0 wrote:
| I'm trying to visualize the sailing conditions the Phoenicians
| would have faced at Bojador - and not really succeeding,
| because I don't know enough about their vessels.
|
| But I'm sure the challenge would be different, and potentially
| less scary, from Henry the Navigator's bane. The Portuguese
| were in high-freeboard open-ocean sailing carracks, with no
| effective recourse to rowing. And Bojador, coming from the
| north, presents a terrifying lee shore: the winds and current
| push vessels towards it, with shoals extending from the coast.
| Sailing close to a lee shore is a bit like walking on a slack
| line: one mistake and disaster is inevitable. You need to
| accurately predict your drift over the whole transit, you need
| hope the wind doesn't veer, and because there's a ferocious
| current too, the wind must not die. In short, it takes a
| skilled captain and navigator (and the much better strategy is
| just to sail offshore, which is what the Portuguese eventually
| did). Even a modern Bermudan yacht would be challenged
| attempting to transit Bojador southerly and close to shore.
|
| A Phoenician trireme-type-boat would not be able to sail upwind
| at all - rowing would have been required for this part of the
| journey. Maybe on a lull day they could out-row the current? In
| any case, the challenges were different - and they would have
| had the additional motivation of not being able to turn back
| for home.
|
| [0] Source: I'm a sailor!
|
| Footnotes so formatted are a shibboleth of this community, not
| a practicality.
| w0de0 wrote:
| Also, Hanno the Navigator's journey is slightly better
| attested and includes traversing the cape north and south.
| Here is a commented translation of the account, from a
| Phoenician temple by way of Greek translators:
| https://www.livius.org/articles/person/hanno-1-the-
| navigator...
| progre wrote:
| Why not? The Phoenicians had rowers and could just take down
| their sails. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme
| they also beached their boats at night so they must have been
| quite comfortable traveling over shallows.
| simonh wrote:
| Passing Bojador is something the Phoenecians had no relevant
| experience for. It's an extensive shallows extending well out
| to sea with subsurface channels that cause violent and
| unpredictable surges.
|
| The only way to do it is to sail far out into open ocean,
| well beyond sight of land, but the change in the winds drives
| you even further out to sea. Even in the early 1800s it was
| lethal, sinking as many as a handful of ships per year. Coast
| hugging just isn't going to cut it.
| alan-crowe wrote:
| Doesn't "rowing" imply having lots of hungry rowers to feed
| and therefore a limited range?
| clint wrote:
| Why do you think they were stopping every couple of months
| to sow a whole harvest of grain before moving on?
| kencausey wrote:
| "every couple of months" is clearly an exaggeration and
| they were stopping at most annually. That said, a large
| number of hands may have indeed explained the need for
| large quantities of food, or maybe just the passage of
| years of time and limited storage space or planning.
| legitster wrote:
| I think beaching the boats at night and having large rowing
| crews makes it less likely that they could have
| circumnavigated Africa. You'd double the amount of time it
| would take, 6x the amount of food and water needed, and
| infinitely increase the chance of a hostile encounter.
|
| Not saying it couldn't be done, but the logistics boggle the
| mind.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| It took over two years and they stopped to plant crops
| according to the story. Add in hunting and foraging, the
| logistics don't seem difficult.
| fsckboy wrote:
| the problem is freeboard
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeboard_(nautical) , i.e. the
| height of the "wall" of the sides of a ship to keep the
| splashy water out.
|
| Oars need to be relatively close to the surface of the water,
| and where there are oarlocks water can get into the ship.
| Open seas are heavy seas, meaning the waves are very very
| high; six foot seas are nothing in the ocean, but a bitch to
| bob around in. And, in heavy seas you need deep draft--the
| "height" of the boat under water--for stability. Also, the
| "powerplant" and "fuel" for oars takes up too much space
| limiting the freight capacity of a ship. This is basically
| why rowing technology was abandoned for sailing around the
| world or across oceans. Paddle steamers were used somewhat,
| but the paddles just don't have the purchase against the
| surrounding water to move a heavy deep draft ship.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| A lot of somehows and must-haves, which would need addressing
| before this is more than a tall tale?
| mabbo wrote:
| > These men made a statement which I do not myself believe,
| though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a
| westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun
| on their right - to northward of them.
|
| It's 600BC. The idea that the world is a sphere isn't accepted
| yet. Herodotus explicitly says he doesn't believe what these
| sailors said- that the sun was to the north. Yet we know that if
| a sailor had done what is being described, this unbelievable fact
| _would_ have been seen (and is regularly seen today by those
| living in the southern hemisphere).
|
| If they didn't do it, where would this odd fact have even come
| from?
|
| To me, that leads a lot of credence to the tale. Lots of
| challenges in the doing, but with the right experienced sailors
| not impossible at all.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The article itself says they traded with Yemen and even that is
| south of the tropic of cancer. Also doesn't take the world
| being a certain shape for this to occur.
| jmercouris wrote:
| [?][?] that must have been a remarkable journey!
| herodotus wrote:
| "The Histories" by Herodotus is a wonderful read, but it really
| matters which translation you use. The is the one I read:
| https://www.amazon.com/Histories-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0...
|
| I also have a newer one translated by Tom Holland, and it seems
| to be a good choice too. This is how Robin Waterford translates
| the quoted section (Book Four, section 42):
|
| "After all, Libya us demonstrably surrounded by water, except for
| the bit of it that forms the boundary with Asia. King Nech of
| Egypt was the first to discover this, as far as we know; after he
| abandoned the digging of the canal from the Nile to the Arabian
| Gulf, his next project was to dispatch ships with Phoenecian
| crews burg obstructions to return via the Pillars of Hercules
| into the northern sea and so back to Egypt. So the Phoenicians
| set out from the Red Sea and sailed into the sea to the south,
| Every autumn, they would come ashore, cultivate whatever bit of
| Libya that had reacjhed in their voyage, and wait for harvest
| time; then, when they had gathered in their crops, they would put
| to sea again. Consequently it was over two years before they
| rounded the Pillars of Hercules and arrived back in Egypt. They
| made a claim which I personally do not believe, although someone
| else might - that as they were sailing around Libya they had the
| sun on their right."
|
| Notice that the tone of this translation is informal, which is
| partly why it is an enjoyable read. But notice also the key
| difference in the final sentence: the once use in the article (de
| Selincourt) adds "to the North of them". This is missing from
| Waterfield and Holland. I suspect that. de Selincourt added this
| as a clarification. I assume he took other liberties in his
| translation too.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Title is a bit misleading. It was the Phoenicians who
| circumnavigated Africa, but the trip was _sponsored_ by the
| Egyptians. Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations were not the
| same, and the Phoenicians were the master sailers /travellers of
| the mediterranean at that time, whereas the Egyptians were known
| for other accomplishments (such as growing wheat, central
| administration).
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| I'm blown away that the Phoenicians (w/ Egyptians)
| circumnavigated Africa in 600BC and ... during 2000 years, it was
| assumed that it was a legend, until being proved otherwise only
| in 1488 - just a few years before America was (officially)
| discovered.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I'm not convinced they did. Not only is this an account by a
| notorious "liar" (as herodotus is known) but the Egyptians were
| notoriously bad at sailing due to being spoiled by the Nile.
| When they travelled in the Red Sea they famously hugged the
| coast stopping at sundown and they hardly ever went far out on
| the Mediterranean.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| I do not have the knowledge to judge Herodotus (for his other
| stories), however even if he lied purposefully on that one,
| he is right about many things that practically none could
| have guessed with the current knowledge of his time.
|
| 1- the position of the sun when navigating in the southern
| hemisphere.
|
| 2- claiming a journey of 3 years
|
| It could be a coincidence of course. But then that would make
| from him a very smart and lucky liar - smart because he had
| to know the earth was round and lucky, because 3 years, it's
| what it would likely take to do it.
| detritus wrote:
| As for one, at least, if the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians
| knew the world was spherical (as they did, and had an
| approximate measure of its dimension), this could be easily
| predicted and might make part of whatever speculative
| discussion they had that was the equivalence of HN or
| general interested internerdery here.
|
| The second is harder to find an excuse for.
|
| (O/T) Of interest to me is something I learned from HN -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador - a large rocky
| shoal off the North Western African coast that scuppered
| many attempts at sailing around that area. It was, somewhat
| naively, the first thing in my long life that made me
| really appreciate how challenging old sea faring would have
| been.
| kragen wrote:
| Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of the Earth pretty
| well in 00240 BCE. Aristotle claimed it was round around
| 00350 BCE, and might have had a correct value, but
| uncertainty about units of measurement means his error
| could have been as large as a factor of 2, and the
| roundness of the earth was still a matter of debate at
| the time.
|
| Herodotus died around 00425 BCE and probably wrote closer
| to 00435 BCE.
|
| They were all "ancient Greeks" (and Eratosthenes lived in
| Egypt, so I guess he was an "ancient Egyptian" too) but
| that doesn't mean they were contemporary. Imagine someone
| in the year 04542 CE writing, "If the ancient Terrans
| knew about nuclear energy (as they did, and had
| unreliable and inefficient fission power plants and
| nuclear weapons), then Lincoln could have easily used
| atomic bombs in the US Civil War!" The timespan from
| Lincoln to Hiroshima was 80 years, from Herodotus to
| Aristotle about 100 years, and from Herodotus to
| Eratosthenes about 200 years. And those were very
| eventful centuries, much like our own.
| briankelly wrote:
| Yes, and there is a large chasm between discovery and
| information that is widely known and accepted among the
| population. For instance, many Europeans went with
| Ptolemy's less accurate calculation (made hundreds of
| years after Eratosthenes's) until the 16th century.
| kragen wrote:
| > _there is a large chasm between discovery and
| information that is widely known and accepted among the
| population_
|
| There are even more extreme examples of this. The Moscow
| Papyrus is from 01850 BCE, and it explains how to
| calculate the area of a hemisphere from its diameter and
| how to calculate the volume of a truncated pyramid, so
| this information had already been discovered 3870 years
| ago--perhaps for many centuries.
|
| Yet what fraction of people today know it? Try asking
| your taxi driver next time you're on vacation in Peru or
| the Philippines. Heck, I don't know the pyramid-volume
| thing myself! I'd have to work it out by integrating a
| quadratic.
|
| (I recall that studying the calculus as a kid was a bit
| of a transition for me, because for the first time I came
| face to face with the realization that most adults'
| intellectual development was arrested around the year
| 01583 for some reason. It wasn't that they took a long
| time to grasp differentiation, or that they had some
| weird irrational belief at odds with reality, but that
| they _just stopped learning_ and _never_ grasped
| differentiation in the decades and decades they lived,
| converting themselves into intellectual dwarfs. I was
| still young enough to imagine that somehow I would avoid
| this...)
| detritus wrote:
| Mediterranean countries had artificial candle-or-whatever
| light with which to play upon spherical fruit dangling
| from trees, which otherwise in the daytime caught
| specular light glimmering through leaves.
|
| Knowing the Earth was round, I don't find it hard to
| imagine that interested minds of the day picked a fruit
| and toyed with it in hand, squinting a bit and
| considering the implications.
| kragen wrote:
| True, and surely some did--not just in the Mediterranean
| but in Peru and in Punt, and not just 2500 years ago but
| even a quarter million years ago--but, despite the whole
| lunar-eclipse thing, nobody had a _really_ compelling
| argument until Eratosthenes precisely measured its
| curvature.
|
| That is, though the wise could imagine a spherical Earth
| for as long as they have had fruit, they could just as
| easily imagine a _non_ -spherical Earth. More easily, I
| think, because, I mean, look around you, it looks flat.
| It wasn't until Eratosthenes that the wise lost the
| ability to believe that the Earth was flat.
| wsc981 wrote:
| There's this guy, Randall Carlson, who claims the great
| pyramid of Cheops is a scaled version of the northern
| hemisphere. If true, I guess it would mean the Egyptians
| knew the earth was round.
|
| https://sacredgeometryinternational.com/the-great-
| pyramid-de...
| generalizations wrote:
| That article is mostly just a hard to read description of
| latitude, longitude and meridians. Didn't actually see
| anywhere that the point was made.
| Someone wrote:
| _If_ they thought that was a scale model of half of
| earth, they must have thought the earth has the shape of
| an octahedron (possibly a slightly deformed one), not
| that of a sphere.
| FredPret wrote:
| "Sacred geometry"?
|
| Beware this type of thing. It's an introduction to
| madness.
|
| Some of these pyramid folks claim that they were built as
| signposts for alien landing strips. And it gets more and
| more nuts from there.
| turndown wrote:
| I'm not sure it's true either, but the fact that his account
| does correctly describe the position of the sun in the sky
| and the fact that Herodotus includes this information to
| discount the story to me tells of at least some kind of trip
| down to the southern portion of Africa. Total
| circumnavigation, though, I do doubt.
|
| Edit: Also, it wasn't Egyptians that did this but Phoenicians
| at the order of the Pharoah.
| guga42k wrote:
| well, this trip sounds way more plausible than Troy/Iliad
| story. And Troy was discovered based on folk tales more or
| less. So who knows, may be Egyptians did it.
|
| ps: for Russian speaking crowd: there is a YA book
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_of_Foam which is a
| fiction version of would-be such a trip.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Second this, it is the first thing that comes to mind
| whenever I hear about this voyage. Gives a very bright
| picture of the ancient world, and it is also a great story
| of love and friendship.
| finiteseries wrote:
| The Egyptians weren't sailing, Herodotus claims it was a
| fleet manned by Phoenician crew.
| fpoling wrote:
| The story alleged it were Phoenicians, not Egyptians, who
| sailed. And those were the best sailors at that time.
| clint wrote:
| The article does not contend that "Egyptians Circumnavigated
| Africa" it says that Egyptians hired Phoenicians to engage in
| an Egyptian-funded circumnavigation of Africa"
| mgerullis wrote:
| > When he started his reign, there were serious military problems
| on Egypt's northeastern border.
|
| Funnily we are still having the same situation
| tgb wrote:
| The ancient Egyptian (or Persians?) built a Suez canal
| predecessor? Incredible. Is it a tourist attraction? And imagine
| building it only to realize that the surface height of the sea
| and the Nile don't match. Oops!
|
| Also I like that the parts of the circumnavigation tale that
| Herotodus thought unbelievable (sun on the "wrong" side) actually
| now make it more clearly true and not just another of Herotodus's
| exaggerations.
| jccooper wrote:
| Egyptian rulers of the Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom, Persians,
| Greeks, (probably) Romans, and Fatimids all dug or redug (and
| probably used, at least briefly) a canal or canals from the
| Nile to the Great Bitter Lakes and Red Sea. The Ptolemaic
| version even apparently had a lock to prevent salt water
| intrusion. It went in and out of service (depending mostly, it
| seems, on ability to maintain it) until it was closed 767 for
| political reasons.
|
| It seems to have been easier to create, as the Red Sea was
| closer, but hard to keep open due to silt from the Nile.
|
| I don't think it looks like much now, as I'm unable to find any
| photos of it. The physical remains were unknown until
| discovered by Napoleon's expedition, so it's probably been
| quite swallowed by the desert save for archaeological traces.
| jandrese wrote:
| The Suez canal requires constant maintenance (dredging) to
| avoid being swallowed up by the desert. It is not hard to
| imagine most evidence of a canal that stopped maintenance in
| 767 being lost to time.
| hahahasure wrote:
| What, you don't think the greatest harp player can summon a
| dolphin and ride them across the sea?
|
| That said, his political stories are entertaining, and the
| philosophy is interesting. It just hurts reading wikipedia and
| seeing how his account vaguely lines up with archeology.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Up until recently I did not know there was a way out from the
| Great Lakes into the ocean that does not involve going up North
| all the way through St. Lawrence. You can go through the
| Welland canal and shortcuts and end up going down South.
| jws wrote:
| You can also go out the Chicago River and down the
| Mississippi. There is a path called "The Great Loop" which
| takes you around the entire eastern United States. (well,
| most people skip New England and Mississippi (the state), but
| you could include them if you wanted.)
|
| https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/great-loop.html
| baggy_trough wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_of_the_Pharaohs
| jccooper wrote:
| It's unlikely those camps left behind any identifiable evidence,
| but wouldn't that be amazing? Makes me wonder if there are any
| identifiable characteristics of 600 BC Mediterranean grains that
| might be found out of place in South Africa.
| dpeck wrote:
| That is interesting and from a very layman's understanding it
| would be unexpected.
|
| I'm just a casual fan of history and have listened to a lot of
| lectures for Mediterranean history around bronze age, and my
| takeaway was that the consensus among Egyptologists was that
| ancient Egyptians never got very good at navigation & seamanship
| because they didn't have to be. They had wind to go upstream on
| the Nile and current to go downstream and hugged close to the
| coast as a rule.
|
| Maybe one-off journeys happened? Handfuls of people do things
| completely out of the ordinary for their culture from time to
| time. But if someone did it, it didn't make much difference back
| home.
| dragandj wrote:
| It was the Phoenicians who did this, while Egyptians ordered
| and paid for it.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The article quotes Herodotus as saying that the Egyptians hired
| a Phoenician crew for this. Phoenicians criss-crossed the Med
| for trade and settlements.
| not2b wrote:
| I suppose they could have hugged the coast all the away around
| Africa. It's also possible that the voyage never happened.
|
| But yes, being first doesn't matter as much as being first to
| be successful and following up. Other Europeans got to the New
| World first but Columbus kicked off Spain's colonization and
| that led to everything else.
| runj__ wrote:
| >This page was created in 1996; last modified on 12 June 2019.
|
| I love the internet.
| foreigner wrote:
| If you haven't read it I highly recommend The History. Herodotus
| can be very entertaining. He pretty clearly lays out things he
| personally saw, things he heard from firsthand accounts, and
| things he heard secondhand. It's fun to see how things get more
| fanciful the farther you get away from the Mediterranean he knew.
|
| One thing that randomly sticks in my head is he said the
| Ethiopians were there most beautiful people in the world because
| they drank so much coffee, but beyond Ethiopia the land is
| uninhabitable because of all the flying snakes.
| rendall wrote:
| Various readings of Herodotus on LibriVox:
| https://librivox.app/book/12931
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| Wait the Ethiopians had coffee in 400BCE?
| ithkuil wrote:
| I remember having read the story that it originated a
| millennium later.
| marci wrote:
| > One thing that randomly sticks in my head is he said the
| Ethiopians were there most beautiful people in the world
| because they drank so much coffee, but beyond Ethiopia the land
| is uninhabitable because of all the flying snakes.
|
| Maybe a thirdhand accounts of the flying snake (?)
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/facts/fl...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16aGSx9gFO4
| pushswap wrote:
| Herodotus isn't considered reliable at all by historians in any
| of his writings whether his topic is close geographically or
| not.
|
| Thucydides is a far better option , being at the beginning of
| the record for the continuous record of reliable historical
| writing.
| benbreen wrote:
| I'm a historian and I recently cited Herodotus in one of my
| forthcoming papers. Is he reliable? We certainly can't assume
| so. But the same goes for Thucydides and every other source
| from the ancient world. It's all about triangulating between
| different sources rather than relying on any one account.
|
| In my case, Herodotus was describing a Scythian practice (the
| use of cannabis) that we've been able to corroborate, in its
| broad outlines, using archaeological finds, which to my mind
| makes it reliable enough to use.
|
| If anyone's interested, this is a quote from the paper, which
| is a work in progress and not published yet: _When Herodotus
| described the purification practices of Scythians following
| elite burials, he wrote of a ritual involving the
| construction of a tent-like enclosure of "wool mats." At the
| center of this enclosure, the Scythians threw cannabis onto
| "red-hot stones, where it smoulders and sends forth such
| fumes that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it." According
| to Herodotus, "the Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor-
| bath." The term Herodotus used here - kannabis, or kannabis -
| was a loan-word from Old Persian (kanab). From Greek, it made
| its way largely unchanged into Latin (cannabis) and from
| thence into the Romance languages and English. "_ [Citing A.
| D. Godley, trans. The Histories of Herodotus (Cambridge, MA:
| Harvard University Press, 1920), 4.74-6.]
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| This is probably outside your wheelhouse, but do you happen
| to know why the Persian word with a single N would have
| come into Greek with a reduplicated N?
| tombh wrote:
| Obligatory: I love Hacker News
|
| Not only am I interested to hear that "hot boxing" is an
| ancient practice, but also the sense of immediacy that I
| now have with ancient Persia over our shared etymology of
| _kanab_.
| hallarempt wrote:
| Check https://mainzerbeobachter.com/2021/05/25/loog-herodotos-
| over... (by the same person who manages livius.net) on how
| Herodotus sometimes isn't all that precise distinguishing
| between things he knew first-had, and things he had by hear-
| say.
| fpoling wrote:
| What is fascinating is how self-reliant Phoenicians were. Take
| wheat. Then periodically during the voyage stop to saw it and
| wait for few months to harvest. Then continue.
|
| This was very risky, as they had no idea about climate in new
| places. But according to what we know was entirely possible along
| African coast.
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