[HN Gopher] How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)
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How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)
Author : leonry
Score : 215 points
Date : 2022-01-27 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bookandsword.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bookandsword.com)
| yboris wrote:
| A marvelous book comparing income and wealth across centuries is
| _The Haves and the Have-Nots_ - A Brief and Idiosyncratic History
| of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic.
|
| One way to compare wealth is to see how many people's labor an
| individual could purchase. It differs across time and countries
| (labor is cheap in India currently for example). This book is a
| careful historic look by an economist - using evidence from
| literature, history, etc. Branko uses a variety of ways to
| compare individuals across history.
|
| https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves...
| rahimiali wrote:
| This sentence stood out to me most: "executioners often claimed
| the clothes that their clients wore to the execution". The word
| "client" is what shook me.
| tristor wrote:
| > The word "client" is what shook me.
|
| Executioners in the past would often be paid by the people they
| were set to execute or their families. That payment included
| the cost of taking care of the body afterwards, and in many
| cases a fee for services as the alternative to an executioner
| was usually much more grim and painful, whereas a good
| executioner guaranteed a quicky and nearly painless death.
|
| There's a fascinating video on YouTube by a channel called
| Weird History with more on the topic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqdoJ5rfT4
| missedthecue wrote:
| seems they'd be a little bloody after the fact
| 1-6 wrote:
| Must be a slow day on HN when we're talking about tunics.
| dymk wrote:
| At least it's not another article about web3 or Amazon
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| What about the price of materials? Take that off of the 500 to
| start with, they'd have to work longer to make ends meet.
| jedberg wrote:
| Up until very recently, durable goods were very expensive and
| labor was very cheap. In some parts of the world, that's still
| the case today.
|
| Just the other day was an article about how Agatha Christie was
| considered middle class even though she had a live in maid and
| nanny, because she couldn't afford a car, because the cost of the
| car was the same as 5 years of salary for both workers.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2x40 to 500 /
| 2x20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic
|
| So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere
| between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000
| and $21000 for the finest quality.
|
| That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's
| clothes into perspective.
| samstave wrote:
| What were the poor people wearing?
|
| How did women earn these - were linen garments a form of
| payment to effective prostitution?
|
| YES: Source; Kimono.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| I imagine poor people wore rags, discarded material crudely
| sewn together.
| vkou wrote:
| > What were the poor people wearing?
|
| Dollar analysis like 'how much did X cost in a pre-industrial
| economy' is incredibly unsuitable for answering these kinds
| of questions.
|
| The answer is - most people weren't wage workers. Most people
| didn't have money. Most people were subsistence peasants, and
| they paid taxes, rent, and for many services in goods. What
| money they had would usually go towards buying things they
| couldn't make.
|
| Most people wore homespun. Clothing a typical Roman peasant
| family[1] would take ~3,000 hours of domestic labour a year,
| most of it devoted to spinning flax. Being domestic labour,
| done by the family, for the family, most of it, was, of
| course, unpaid.
|
| [1] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-
| did-t...
| xyzzyz wrote:
| The poor would typically make their own clothes. This was of
| course very labor intensive, but back in the day, benefits
| from division of labor weren't that huge, and the poor often
| did not have better employment opportunities (that's why they
| were poor in the first place).
| ajuc wrote:
| 90%+ worked in farming, and in farming depending on the
| climate over the year you had months with nothing to do vs
| months with 16 hours of work a day. The whole system was
| designed around making sure few people starved and work was
| distributed around somewhat sensibly with such wild
| seasonal swings of labour shortage and surplus.
|
| So yeah, DIY all the way.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Yep. My grandmother's family in rural Poland was still
| making all their their clothes (from their homegrown
| linen and sheep) in 1930s.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Modern business suit prices in other words or thereabouts.
| devenson wrote:
| The cost is a feature, not a bug. It must be pricey to signal
| status.
| [deleted]
| nabilhat wrote:
| > _That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people
| 's clothes into perspective._
|
| Cloth was so valuable that the words for both the robber and
| the extremely valuable robes they stole and plundered share a
| common origin:
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/robe#etymonline_v_15128
| qwytw wrote:
| An average worker in Ancient Rome is not really comparable to a
| worker in a modern country (e.g he likely would had spent >50%
| of his income on food, so equivalent wage would probably below
| the minimum wage in US).
|
| The prices in Diocletian's degree don't really make much sense,
| e.g. for 40 Denarii you could buy ~5 pounds of beef or only 8
| pounds of rye/barley. So likely the price for tunics is quite a
| bit higher than the real market price. Based on 1st AD
| prices/wages a tunic cost 15 sestertii which is equal to around
| 3-4 days wage (a "worker" likely earned ~ 4 sestertii per day)
| zach_garwood wrote:
| The average worker in ancient Rome was a slave.
| qwytw wrote:
| The proportion of slaves in the entire Roman Empire never
| rose to much more than 15-20% also by 300 AD serfdom had
| already started to replace slavery in rural areas.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| No they weren't.
| picsao wrote:
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's
| clothes into perspective.
|
| Also probably the source of the "they'd take the shirt of his
| back" saying.
| emaginniss wrote:
| The phrase is usually "he'd give you the shirt off his back."
| That's much nicer
| missedthecue wrote:
| and it really has nothing to do with the price of clothing
| dsr_ wrote:
| It does, at least a little.
|
| If you give someone a $20 shirt, causing yourself a
| little embarassment, that's not quite the same commitment
| to charity as giving them your $20,000 car.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Think of it this way; my shirt would have a lot more
| value to me than value to you. Therefore, if I gave you
| the shirt off my own back would show a high degree of
| selflessness.
|
| That's what the phrase conveys.
| mhalle wrote:
| Probably not. "Steal the shirt off someone's back" means to
| take everything from a person, even the most basic and least
| significant item of clothing that they are wearing, and leave
| them with nothing.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and
| $21000 for the finest quality.
|
| Go look at the price for a nice suit, or a designer dress.
| Those numbers are not terribly high.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| "Not terribly high," I mean 99.5% of Americans will never
| spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment.
| It seems pretty high to me. Also you have to get pretty high
| up into the luxury market before you'll find a suit that
| costs $7,000. Armanis are synonymous with luxury suits in the
| public consciousness and they top out at $4,000, according to
| their website.
|
| The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of
| making them. They come from the fact that they _are_ luxury
| items -- it 's the exclusivity and signaling that you're
| paying for. For more on this phenomenon see:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
| dharmab wrote:
| > I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower
| end of that range on a single garment.
|
| Wedding dresses?
| Lorin wrote:
| This is what I was looking for in the article, thank you!
| causi wrote:
| I wonder how the longevity compares. Would a tunic last much
| longer than a modern pair of jeans?
| lstodd wrote:
| Even contemporary linen clothes last way longer than a random
| pair of jeans.
|
| It's not that onesided, good linen trousers are usually
| somewhat more free-fitting, and usually don't chafe as much
| as typical jeans models. But still.
|
| Also superior water vapor exchange is superior.
| bocytron wrote:
| If my calculations are correct, that would be ~$700 to $1400 for
| a linen tunic.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| Not the author, don't know him, no connection - but I caught a
| glimpse somewhere on the blog that he is currently unemployed. As
| an open-source maintainer, I feel like it is my duty to plug him
| so he can perhaps get some patrons or donations, the blog is
| great. https://www.bookandsword.com/support/
|
| He is also not a software engineer or in tech in any meaningful
| way, so his 'tip to total income' ratio is probably off the chart
| compared to, say, me.
|
| As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some
| sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these
| tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just
| gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this.
| aksss wrote:
| His blog had a mildly interesting post on rereading one of the
| SM Sterling novels, Against the Tide of Years. I really enjoyed
| those books, and in the comments it appears SM Sterling is
| actually there engaging, which is very cool!
| [deleted]
| pixodaros wrote:
| Thanks! I updated the link on the blog post and on my support
| page to point to my Canadian paypal account which is more
| accessible while I am overseas than my Austrian paypal account.
|
| I think the issues funding open-source are very similar to the
| issues funding writing.
| Zababa wrote:
| > As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some
| sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom
| these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just
| gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this.
|
| That's a good point. On twitter, I see very often people asking
| for money for a surgery, an accident, or just in general. I
| feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't
| have any hard data to back this up. Just like you, I don't have
| any good answer to that.
| AdamN wrote:
| Your online social milieu is likely getting poorer over time.
| In the olden days, online meeting grounds like Twitter were
| elite locations. Now they're commons. I notice this the most
| on Reddit where I'm sometimes reminded how many blue collar
| people there are (and also what a wide age range exists
| there).
| baxtr wrote:
| Yeah, that's a trend. I think it's also the main underlying
| reason why Google results are getting worse (worse for
| elites like us...).
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don
| 't have any hard data to back this up. Just like you, I don't
| have any good answer to that._
|
| Maybe your network is growing or, more realistically, the
| global pandemic we happen to be in is causing issues than
| normal. IMO, the answer to this would be voting for
| politicians who support a welfare system where an accident
| doesn't bankrupt you (regardless of things like employment
| status).
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Something that continually just blows my mind is how _new_
| spinning wheels are. The most plausible range of time of arrival
| of the wheel in European contexts is between the mid-1200s to
| about 1340, which means that textiles produced previously to that
| were made with drop spindles:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindl...
|
| That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more
| staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for
| ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time!
| slowhand09 wrote:
| A lifetime ago I worked in a textile mill in the US. After a
| several months I worked my way up to be a machine operator, a
| weaver. I had upwards of 50 weaving machines I kept operating
| thru my shift. Each of these produced probably 80meters *
| 6meters of fabric in an 8 hour shift. And at this rate, mills
| in southeast asia were able to undercut prices so much the US
| industry collapsed.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| It's pretty amazing how much efficient you can build in if
| you're starting a process from scratch and know what the
| first mover did. This is precisely how the US pushed the UK
| out of the textile business. It's no wonder that it happened
| again after another series of innovations.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| How old were the machinese you operated? I'm imagining turn
| of the century steam powered weavers. :)
| slowhand09 wrote:
| They were state of the art MAV Rapier machines, in mid
| 1970's. They didn't use shuttles, but instead had rapiers
| that transported the fibers across the weave.
| unemphysbro wrote:
| I'd imagine creating uniform and robust ball-bearings is not an
| easy feat.
| progman32 wrote:
| Fortunately poured bearings (i.e., with Babbitt alloys) are
| much easier to create! You pour it into a shell with the
| shaft already installed. It's just tin and lead with a couple
| percent copper and antimony.
|
| Now, getting a perfectly round shaft... also tough.
| morsch wrote:
| In a similar vein, I was astonished to read how much time was
| spent on spinning before the invention of the spinning wheel:
|
| _Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most
| frequently performed work-task in the ancient world (the
| various farming tasks being more varied and more seasonal,
| while spinning was being done continuously all year round). We
| tend to think of the pre-modern world as a world of farmers
| (and it was) but we ought just as well to think of it as a
| world of spinnners._
|
| I had no idea! From https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-
| clothing-how-did-t...
|
| The spinning wheel started out being three times more
| productive (at a somewhat reduced quality) and then, within a
| century or two, ten times more productive than the previous
| method.
|
| _Needless to say, a reduction in labor time potentially close
| to an order of magnitude in the most labor-intensive part
| (again, c. 80% of the labor time!) of textile production had
| enormous economic impacts (...). English cloth production
| tripled (measured by weight) between 1315 and 1545 and cloth
| produced per capita increased five-fold._
| lumost wrote:
| It's curious, if you go back in time far enough with all
| knowledge from the present, you'd surely arrive at a point
| where you still need to work your entire life to bring one
| component of one innovation to life. Even then, the innovation
| would be unlikely to survive your death due to other missing
| parts of the supply chain.
|
| Try building a musket in Ancient Greece, you'd need to start
| with building the steel supply chain - which means drilling
| into granite with wooden and bronze hand tools...
| aledalgrande wrote:
| Related to this if you like the topic and anime, watch Dr.
| Stone.
| chopin wrote:
| I am pretty sure you could build a musket from bronze. Afaik
| the early cannons where made of it.
|
| Sourcing of the ingredients for black powder might have been
| harder.
| ghaff wrote:
| Cannons were cast however and musket barrels aren't. It's
| unclear you could make the barrels thick/strong enough to
| be useful. (At some point, you end up with something
| probably less useful than a refined bow design.)
|
| In general, with these scenarios, another variable is do
| you just wake up in another time or do you have time to
| prepare, maybe have reference books/artifacts, figure out
| what you can do given technology and material availability,
| maybe learn the language, etc.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Yes, you very much could build an effective firearm using
| bronze or brass. Brass barrels were quite commonly used
| historically. They are less suitable for modern, high
| pressure propellants, but for black powder firearms,
| they'll work just fine.
| retrac wrote:
| Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools
| of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built
| the Antikythera mechanism. But we do know some things that
| would seem like crazy hacks to the ancients. For example, I
| know a simple trick. I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary
| size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus
| and tablet. This would have blown the minds of a learned
| Roman or Greek from that time.
|
| For those who find the general idea enticing, there was a
| book written about 80 years ago on this idea. What if a time
| traveller got sent back to Ancient Rome?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall
|
| A couple friends and I are big fans of the book, and premise.
| We always figured it was far too optimistic. Most likely
| you'd die of dysentery or be sold off into slavery. But
| assuming not, I figure the real path to power wouldn't be
| brandy, but strong acids and electroplating.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Yeah Lest Darkness Fall the optimistic, knowledge from the
| future makes you powerful view of things - which really the
| hero was an academic who knew a lot about Rome of the
| period but also had lots of practical knowledge that he
| managed to make use of to improve his initial position of
| actually being made a slave.
|
| The less optimistic version would be this
| https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2014/10/08/the-american-
| so...
|
| on edit: removed a not that should not have been there
| Telemakhos wrote:
| > I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do
| it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet.
|
| So could a Roman or Greek. He'd just need a counting board
| and some stones. He could probably do it faster than you,
| as well. Anyone using an abacus today could perform almost
| exactly the same algorithms, with the added convenience of
| having beads on rods in a frame instead of an unwieldy
| counting board and stones. The algorithms are the same, and
| you can also do division and square roots with a counting
| board or abacus. When done deftly moving stones around on
| the counting board (and Aristotle makes clear that this
| goes so quickly that it's possible for the person
| calculating to cheat an onlooker, like in a con-man's shell
| game), one might choose to write the result down on a
| tablet, and he might just finish writing before you do.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Ok but we know about zero!
| jacobolus wrote:
| Anyone with a counting board also has zeros, as empty
| places with no counters, and ancient people had no
| problem understanding and using the concept of zero in
| calculations (though most probably would not have
| considered zero a "number" per se). They just didn't
| write explicit zeros in their permanent serialization
| format.
|
| But there are certainly plenty of mathematical ideas and
| tools ancient people didn't know about: they didn't have
| a convenient method of manipulating algebraic expressions
| and equations; they had only the most rudimentary version
| of differential/integral calculus; they didn't have group
| theory, linear algebra, complex analysis, etc.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Or, indeed, negative numbers.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| > this goes so quickly
|
| Many people don't realize how fast it is to work on
| abacus (or soroban in Japanese). Here is an example of
| what a 7 year old can do
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQtqlB-jXO0
|
| For many years I always did my taxes and other accounting
| using an abacus because it was sooo much easier than
| longhand (this was before calculators).
|
| There is the famous Feynman story as well:
|
| https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html
|
| But you wouldn't impress an ancient Greek very much by
| taking cube roots quickly because there wouldn't be much
| call for that.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _goes so quickly that it 's possible for the person
| calculating to cheat an onlooker_
|
| Indeed, the biggest advantage of paper arithmetic is that
| it leaves a written record: each step in the algorithm
| can be checked for mistakes afterward. It is otherwise
| significantly slower and not inherently more accurate
| than a counting board.
|
| The other advantage that paper arithmetic has is that it
| can be easily reproduced in printed books, making
| learning more advanced techniques more accessible /
| easier to spread to anyone literate, without requiring an
| expert teacher.
|
| (And finally, paper arithmetic [eventually] has the
| advantage that it can be more conveniently extended and
| generalized to include more kinds of operations and
| structures, in a way that is easier to explain and teach
| than adding new kinds of counting board rules. Paper
| arithmetic is a more natural precursor for symbolic
| algebra than counting-board calculation.)
|
| The big disadvantage of paper arithmetic is that it
| depends on widespread literacy and cheap access to paper
| (or similar material). In a context where paper is
| expensive or unavailable, written arithmetic is not very
| compelling.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| Why not build a printing press? All you really need to do
| is carve some wood. As expensive as tunics were, books were
| much more so. Copying the bible would have taken several
| months (if not years) of labour. And the ability and
| control to spread such knowledge faster than others would
| not only be very lucrative but a source of great power.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| The printing press is the easy part - parchment was
| expensive and hard or impossible to get.
| gruez wrote:
| >Why not build a printing press? All you really need to
| do is carve some wood
|
| The printing press seems to be far more complex than just
| "carve some wood". Otherwise I find it hard to believe
| that it took until 1400AD for people to figure out how to
| make large stamps.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg's_
| pre...
| samatman wrote:
| Woodblock printing was invented in the 7th century in
| Tang China.
|
| The prerequisite for economic printing is paper, and the
| tech tree for paper is reproducible from Roman
| conditions. The production of vellum is measured in
| years, scribes were barely the limiting factor on text
| production.
| ghaff wrote:
| There is a lot of basic scientific knowledge that
| many/most modern people have (germ theory of disease, how
| the body works at some level, astronomy 101, etc.) But
| ancient people weren't stupid. They just didn't have
| advanced technology. Recreating a whole chain of
| technology to bring about the iron age maybe 1000 years
| early probably isn't happening. The fact is that they're
| mostly doing pretty well with building things that the
| technology more or less exists for.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| A book on agricultural developments post-antiquity to the
| industrial revolution would be a far more immediate
| source of power. Less starving -> more surplus -> more
| specialization of labor and societal development ->
| goto(1).
| germinalphrase wrote:
| There are political liabilities to the printing press.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| >Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the
| tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who
| built the Antikythera mechanism.
|
| The Greeks had steam engines.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
|
| It's just that slaves were vastly cheaper. In Britain early
| steam engines were price competitive with horses only at
| the coal mine for the first century of their operation.
| tynpeddler wrote:
| An aeolipile is massively inefficient and it would have
| been almost impossible for ancient societies to extract
| useful work from it. By constantly releasing steam, an
| enormous amount of energy and matter is released from the
| engine that could otherwise be recycled. It's like trying
| to power a car with a rocket engine. The first steam
| engines that were used for practical work were low
| powered and very unreliable, but they did close the the
| steam cycle which allowed them to exploit the liquid ->
| gas phase transition while keeping (some or) the hot
| water around to reheat.
| samstave wrote:
| Do you recall the famous 'fan-fiction' fable of Prufrock on
| Reddit that was asked what happened if a modern military
| [Platoon?] was transported to ancient rome, and how would
| they fare against roman legions...
|
| It was supoposed to have been opted for a movie... and then
| douchebagery ensues and it never made it to light...
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| This is reminiscent of the book series A Time Odyssey, by
| Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke, where a UN
| helicopter crew and a couple of cosmonauts from 2037, a
| late 19th century British force, the Mongol horde under
| Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great's army and a couple of
| early hominids happen to meet each other. I remember it
| as a quite interesting parallel to A Space Odyssey.
| Highly recommended.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I love this whole premise, is there a name for this genre
| of fiction?
| ftth_finland wrote:
| Alternative history.
| lumost wrote:
| An Ancient greek or Roman would have lacked paper. Using
| the available paper on arithmetic would have been seen as
| an inordinate waste of dies and paper.
| retrac wrote:
| For temporary purposes, they usually wrote on wax tablets
| with styluses, which could be easily melted and re-molded
| for reuse. They came in little boxes with a protective
| cover and were used for temporary records and drafts and
| personal letters: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
| commons/1/11/Table_wi...
|
| And there's always sand! It's probably apocryphal but the
| legend is that Archimedes was slain by a Roman soldier
| during the taking of Syracuse when he objected -- "Don't
| disturb my circles!" -- to how the soldier marched
| through his trigonometry problems.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I bet most STEM related people could work out how to
| produce lot or trig tables with a little thinking. I wonder
| if the ancient Greeks would appreciate those.
|
| Edit: It turns out they could produce their own for trig
| functions and wouldn't have been all that impressed by the
| log table because they didn't have logs.
| ftth_finland wrote:
| If you are into alternative history, Eric Flint does an
| optimistic, entertaining and lighthearted take on both
| Ancient Rome and the 17th century.
|
| The first book from the 17th century series, 1632, is
| downloadable for free from Baen books.
| damontal wrote:
| Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is
| about this as well.
|
| I thought it would be a silly story about a guy who get
| sent to the past but it is incredibly dark and pessimistic.
| The Yankee's knowledge wows everyone, he's put in charge of
| a war machine and creates an industrialized hell hole.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the
| tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who
| built the Antikythera mechanism.
|
| Sure you could. The antikythera mechanism shows more than
| enough skill and precision to make a small one. It might
| only be a toy for the rich though. I'm not sure if you
| could afford enough metal to make one large enough to do
| useful work, and even if you could the fuel required might
| kill it (coal wasn't really available at the time, though
| knowing it is useful might be enough to find and use it).
| The metals of the time where not up to a modern high
| pressure (and thus efficient) steam engine, but a large low
| pressure steam engine is perfectly possible.
|
| That said, water or wind power would be a much better
| invention to focus your efforts on. I'm not sure how much
| of that they had though.
| mikewarot wrote:
| No, you couldn't. It wasn't until Wilkinson had perfected
| his boring machine and Watt had a model of a steam engine
| that could not be be realized because he couldn't get a
| precise enough bore, that Wilkinson took it upon himself
| to bore the first steam engine cylinder that worked.
|
| In order to get this, there are a lot of steps involved,
| including the ability to sand cast and bore iron of
| sufficient quality to take a reasonable amount of
| pressure.
|
| If you got to that point, you might want to build a
| Stirling engine instead, it's far less likely to explode
| and kill people.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| Windmills date back to the 9th century, water wheels to
| the 1st or earlier.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > but a large low pressure steam engine is perfectly
| possible.
|
| Irrespective of whether it was possible for the Greeks to
| make them, what would be the economic incentive for them
| to build large low pressure steam engines at scale? In
| our timeline, the only serious application of large low
| pressure steam engines was pumping water out of mines,
| from after 1720 or so. Even with the incentive of the
| industrial revolution, it took almost a century to get
| small high-powered engines, with the first public steam
| train in 1825.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Milling grain, hammering wrought iron, crushing ore etc.
| There were plenty of uses of mechanized power even in
| antiquity, and the ancients realized that through use of
| water wheels.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Milling grain, hammering wrought iron, crushing ore etc
|
| Are these actually feasible with a large low-pressure
| steam engine of the sort that the Greeks could have
| actually constructed? Remember that the early real steam
| engines were only just powerful enough to slowly lift
| buckets of water.
|
| [Edit] - good answers below - thanks! But I think the
| question of economic viability still stands. As pointed
| out elsewhere, a waterwheel is easy to construct and
| doesn't have ongoing fuel costs. A steam engine requires
| a reasonably well developed iron/steel working industry
| (including skilled artisans), which in turn requires a
| fair amount of iron ore and fuel to support smelting. The
| finished steam engine would require a lot of wood as
| fuel, or coal, which wasn't widely available in ancient
| Greece, or easily transportable without a lot of effort.
| Ancient Greek metallurgy was definitely not sophisticated
| enough to build a steam train and as for for building a
| railway 1) they could barely build graded roads and 2)
| they would have needed a phenomenal amount of mass-
| produced steel for the tracks.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Yes, because that work had been done at the time by even
| more underpowered devices, that is, by actual humans.
| You're lucky if you get half a horsepower from a good
| human, so replacing them with low HP steam engines might
| still be worthwhile.
| ajuc wrote:
| Water hammer is a big lever that has a hammer on one side
| and a big bucket of water on the other side. Bucket gets
| filed by a water stream, gets heavier than the hammer and
| lifts it, and then at the lowest point (of the bucket) it
| is mounted in such way that the water spills and the
| hammer drops, resetting the machine. No precision
| technology needed, they could do it in stone age.
|
| You can do the same thing with fireplace and water and
| it's certainly doable with ancient technology, but I'm
| not sure it's worth it when you have more running water
| than industry needs anyway.
|
| Another thing they could do is Heron's steam turbine
| geared in such a way that it does useful work. Also not
| sure if it's worth it.
|
| This trick (using low power to lift the hammer slowly and
| dropping it quickly) can be adapted to use any
| inefficient power source - hamster powered mills are
| possible ;)
| mywittyname wrote:
| I don't think the OP is saying that there wasn't a need
| for mechanized power, just that it wasn't profitable to
| get that power from steam.
|
| Water wheels have no fuel costs, and very little ongoing
| maintenance costs. A steam engine that could be built in
| antiquity would be incredibly expensive in both respects.
| So even if the technology existed, there would be little
| economic incentive to use it over a water wheels, since
| transportation is cheaper than fuel and maintenance.
|
| As recently as 1900, steam engines were so expensive that
| most farmers rented equipment by the day.
| shuntress wrote:
| Simple solution: Military industry.
|
| Some generals would likely find a mobile mill stone quite
| useful. When your centuria loot a conquered land they can
| now take raw grains in addition to processed flour
| without being tied down to the local stationary mills.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > mobile mill stone
|
| ... makes the brigade/regiment/whatever far _less_ mobile
| for no real benefit.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Some generals would likely find a mobile mill stone
| quite useful. When your centuria loot a conquered land
| they can now take raw grains in addition to processed
| flour without being tied down to the local stationary
| mills.
|
| Not in the slightest. The legion on the march has no use
| for a millstone because nobody's eating bread. They would
| never carry processed flour, because it spoils quickly.
| They carried raw grain and made porridge from it.
| shuntress wrote:
| That sounds wrong but I don't know enough about ancient
| roman military rations to dispute it. Do you have any
| sources?
|
| I thought they primarily consumed bread (both hardtack
| and leavened), watered down wine/vinegar, and meat (when
| available.)
| ghaff wrote:
| Even in the late 19th century, areas with fast moving
| water (like the Northeast US) tended to use water power
| for mills rather than steam.
| rsecora wrote:
| Right, and getting the finance to start the journey will be
| problematic.
|
| The elevator pitch for the musket will sound like black
| magic.
| ghaff wrote:
| In ancient Greece, I wouldn't be surprised if a crossbow (a
| bow that can be used with relatively little training!)
| wouldn't be more useful than very primitive firearms.
| smhenderson wrote:
| Ancient Greece had the ballista as early as 400 BC so
| this also wouldn't have seemed that magic or mysterious
| to them as well.
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm not sure even with an unlimited budget you could get
| metals that would work as a musket. A cannon could be done
| if you know how, but the cost of that much metal would mean
| you would need the unlimited budget.
| ghaff wrote:
| Black powder bronze firearms did apparently exist
| historically. Note that bronze is a fairly broad term for
| a range of alloys, some of which I'm guessing didn't
| exist in the "bronze age."
| mywittyname wrote:
| One could probably build a cannon out of mostly wood,
| with some banding for strategic reinforcement.
|
| It would be fucking dangerous to operate and might not be
| all that effective. But my understanding is that the
| early cannons mainly worked by striking so much fear into
| people, that they surrendered without resistance.
|
| The machines used to bore cannon holes into logs (lathes)
| would probably be nearly as profitable as the cannons
| themselves. And one could presumably use their cannon
| production business to finance their lathe-building
| business.
|
| Oh, and there's always dynamite.
| jewel wrote:
| There's a book roughly on that topic called "How to Invent
| Everything" that I enjoyed, but I'm not sure I remember
| enough of it now to be of any good, so I'm going to be sure
| to grab it before going back in time.
|
| Also along the same lines is "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild
| Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm", which I also
| enjoyed and keep a copy around just in case.
| pomian wrote:
| A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. A novel by Mark
| Twain. it is really fun.
| [deleted]
| ajuc wrote:
| There's this "Conrad Stargard" book series about an engineer
| going back in time to 13th century Poland and starting
| industrial revolution there. The book is VERY, VERY sexist
| with a strong dose of ephebophilia, the hero is 100% Gary Stu
| with Catholic-supremacy mania, but the engineering challenges
| and solutions are quite well presented. The trick was to get
| a powerful patron early and adapt the technology to the
| limitations and the engineering looked pretty realistic to
| me.
|
| For example he makes rails but no locomotives because pulling
| standarized cars with standarized containers along low-
| friction rails already brings most of the benefits of modern
| transport network and is much easier than designing a steam
| locomotive in 1230s.
|
| There's a lot about industrializing cloth production there,
| too and it's quite detailed. I liked it despite all the awful
| stuff.
| Shaanie wrote:
| I wonder which modern information would be actually useful a
| thousand years ago. Things like electricity, cumbustion
| engine etc wouldn't be very useful, but perhaps something
| steam-powered?
|
| One low-hanging fruit would be sterilization and hand-washing
| for medical operations, at least.
| ben_w wrote:
| As someone mentioned on a different thread, a printing
| press would make a massive difference. The wine presses of
| 1022 were people standing on grapes in a box, so that could
| be significantly improved too.
|
| Significant steam power (so not that ancient Greek toy)
| might prove too difficult for the engineering of the era,
| but a pressure cooker might be possible as it's allowed to
| leak.
|
| Screw cutting lathes, and in particular the guided
| toolpaths to make the output reliable and consistent, would
| be a big deal.
|
| Might be able to bootstrap enough magnets and wires for
| basic electricity, at which point you can make much better
| compasses -- the Chinese were the first to go beyond
| lodestones and that was about 1000 years ago -- and
| electricity makes electroplating possible and some acids
| (e.g. hydrochloric) and alkalis (e.g. sodium hydroxide)
| basically trivial.
|
| Float glass would radically increase the size and quality
| of individual windows panes. Knowing that lead oxide
| reduces the melting point would make manufacture much
| easier.
|
| Wikipedia's list of medieval technology has some
| interesting surprises: apparently wheelbarrows are only
| about 850 years old, hourglasses and segmented arch bridges
| only about 680 years old.
| goda90 wrote:
| Humans have been working with glass for a really long time.
| I wonder how hard it would be to make a microscope and kick
| off germ theory and antibiotics and such back then.
| showerst wrote:
| There's a bunch of youtube channels with various takes on
| "starting from scratch". It seems like a mix of things that
| are very hard to bootstrap (metal being a big one!), and
| things that were more coincidental (lathes, saddles and
| riding gear, spinning looms).
|
| Having a modern high school math education would make you the
| greatest mathematician in history up to about Newton, but
| more practically speaking I'm thinking that if you understood
| the principles behind good charcoal, a wood lathe, and how
| concrete and mortar actually work you could probably kick
| civilization up at least a few hundred years.
|
| I'm envisioning something like this --
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U although they do
| rely on 18th century metals there you could start from less.
|
| There's a great clickspring series where he thinks about what
| kind of knowledge and tools would be required to build the
| antikythera mechanism, I think that's a great example of
| "master tradesman that got surprisingly far by dedication to
| a few small areas, but then that knowledge was lost".
| jaclaz wrote:
| Not the best example (IMHO):
|
| >how concrete and mortar actually work
|
| Would you tell Roman engineers how to deal with those?
|
| (they actually invented it, and - for certain applications
| - their concrete is still superior to modern one)
| showerst wrote:
| I was thinking in terms of ancient Greece like the GP
| mentioned. That said, Romans invented and pioneered
| concrete, but they didn't really understand how or why it
| worked, it was just centuries of excellent trial and
| error. They also had problems replicating it out of base
| materials other than volcanic ash.
|
| Now that said I have my doubts that there are that many
| people on earth who could build better concrete for a
| given application than the Romans with no store to go buy
| pure materials from, I'm certainly not one of them.
|
| That's also why I didn't talk about modern steel -- In my
| head I vaguely understand that there's a chain from
| copper to wire to a rotor/stator to electrolysis to
| oxygen gas to the Bessemer process, but I'd be amazed if
| there's anyone on earth who could bootstrap it in one
| lifetime, even with an ancient king's resources.
| ghaff wrote:
| In general, as someone else mentioned in the context of
| agriculture, the low-hanging fruit are probably
| innovations that aren't especially complicated or require
| possibly uncommon elements and other material. Stirrups
| for example in Europe. Also mostly abstract (but possibly
| useful) scientific and medical knowledge.
|
| Anything that requires a long technology tree to
| implement effectively is going to be hard.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you have woodworking skills you could make a crude but
| working spinning wheel in about a week with crude tools. They
| are simple machines once you understand them, and most of it
| can be made crude and still work. The idea is what is hard
| not the construction which is why once one was made it spread
| fast. I suspect (I think Bret Devereaux would agree) that if
| the males who were allowed to be creative had thought about
| women's work at all they would have made one several thousand
| years before. I wouldn't be surprised is some unknown woman
| did create something close on her own but society norms meant
| it didn't spread (if this happened all evidence would have
| burned/rotted - Luddites of the day may have destroyed it and
| the inventor).
|
| As a modern educated man I'd turn much of my attention to
| "women's work" first - in large part because there is low
| hanging fruit there that would make my life better. The
| spinning wheel and looms would be a great changer, and
| something I think just having seen one in a history museum
| and a few weeks to watch how women work would allow me to
| make things work, then a few months in the woods to make a
| prototype.
|
| For "men's work" things are harder because society allowed
| smart men to think about improvements. Maybe I could create
| gunpowder, but I would prefer to focus my war efforts on a
| good defense. I know good steel has controlled amounts of
| manganese and carbon in it (I'm sure more than those two),
| but I don't know how to control those amounts and my visits
| to museums and chemistry classes haven't given me enough
| information to think I could create those from scratch. That
| is before we consider the amount of labor needed to get the
| ore. (though if metal is available I'd make a steam engine)
|
| Note that the above assumes I end up in or near Europe. I
| have no idea if any of societies on the other continents
| could support the above efforts.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| kragen wrote:
| Would you? Maybe it depends on how hard you have to struggle
| merely to survive and how much freedom you have. If you were
| a helot in ancient Sparta you'd have to be careful not to
| draw the attention of the Spartiates; they'd kill you for
| sport if they thought you were too virtuous.
|
| What is this about drilling into granite? The Egyptians were
| drilling into granite a thousand years earlier using copper
| tube drills and quartz sand, which they probably could have
| drilled a lot faster if they'd known about emery, but I don't
| understand where granite drilling fits into the steel supply
| chain.
|
| But with freedom and some way to survive you can get pretty
| far. In only four and a half years, apparently without using
| modern materials other than a video camera and writing
| instruments, John Plant was able to bootstrap from sticks and
| stones up to celt axes, coarse pants (spun of course with a
| drop spindle), a centrifugal blower, iron smelting powered by
| it, fired bricks, several huts, ceramic tile roofs,
| underfloor heating, cob construction, bow and arrow, atlatl,
| lime cement, wood ash cement, crawfish traps, rock-heated
| soup pots, charcoal burning, a pump drill, and a monjolo.
|
| He hasn't yet been able to smelt enough iron to make so much
| as a fishhook, though, and Australian law doesn't allow him
| to hunt animals for sinew, leather, catgut, bone, and
| bladder.
|
| A thing he's missing so far is metrology, which is very
| important for chemistry and for muskets and other machines.
| He also doesn't have much in the way of chemical resources on
| his land: no saltpeter and no concentrated salt, though he
| could perhaps purify them from urine.
|
| Still, imagine how far he could get in 40 years with _all_
| the knowledge from the present and without those
| restrictions.
|
| https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Well even that would vary widely. Some places it's easier to
| extract iron ore than others, or you could just melt down a
| meteorite and use that iron/steel to mine more ore.
|
| Drilling also isn't necessarily so hard. Neolithic Chinese
| built perfectly circular discs out of jade, an extremely hard
| stone. They had no metal tools. It's possible that they could
| have developed more sophisticated equipment for mining rock,
| if they realized what they could do with it once they
| extracted it. https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-
| phenomena/myster...
| jacobolus wrote:
| How much faster is a spinning wheel (of typical 500-year-old
| design, say) vs. a drop spindle, in the hands of someone with
| 20 years of spinning experience? And can the spinning wheel
| produce yarn that has similar quality?
|
| From skimming around online, it seems that expert spinners get
| extremely fast with a drop spindle, and can produce higher
| quality yarn. But I can't find a definitive answer about the
| comparative speed.
| nabilhat wrote:
| Drop spindles don't spin continuously, which gives the wheel
| an uptime advantage.
|
| Even modern spinners who prefer a drop spindle often have a
| wheel on hand for plying. Spinning a thread out of a blob of
| fluff can be engaging and interesting, while plying is a
| tedious process that's hard to get wrong without falling
| asleep in the middle. There's not really an art or skill to
| plying. A wheel can knock out this boring part of the
| spinning process much more quickly.
| eitally wrote:
| There are a bunch of similar articles describing costs in the
| Middle Ages. Here's one example (there's another on the
| bookandsword.com site, too):
|
| https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-...
| Fenrisulfr wrote:
| There's a great book about the progression of clothing, textiles,
| and fabric being scarce and expensive to commonplace and cheap.
| It runs through the various technological innovations (think
| cotton gin, but plenty more), culture, and economics. The Fabric
| of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. Great quote about Viking
| sail ships:
|
| "Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles)
| of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to
| produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to
| make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the
| wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to
| finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they
| powered."
| soperj wrote:
| You'd have to cut the trees, get them from the forest to the
| build site, and then make lumber out of them and dry them.
| Can't imagine it would be that much different.
| Someone wrote:
| In those times, chances are they moved the build site to the
| trees, and made sure the trees were close to the water (with
| more forest and a much smaller population, such trees could
| probably be found fairly easily)
|
| Also, they didn't dry the wood.
| https://regia.org/research/ships/Ships1.htm:
|
| _"Timber was used green - in other words, shortly after
| felling. This is different to more modern practice, where the
| timber is "seasoned" - left to dry for several years. Green
| wood is easier to work, and more flexible, which can help
| with some of the more complex shapes found in Viking boats.
| Wood can be kept "green" for several years by keeping it
| immersed in water - a stem (or stern) of a Viking style boat
| was found on the island of Eig in what, a thousand years ago,
| had been a lake. As it had never been used - there were no
| indications of rivet holes - it was probably made up when the
| boat-builder had got a spare piece of suitable timber, and he
| was waiting for a similar bit for the stern (or stem) which
| never arrived.
|
| It is also possible to steam green wood without complex
| equipment like the steam boxes used today. Simply by heating
| a plank over a fire, the moisture inside the wood heats up
| and causes the fibres to loosen. This means that - for a few
| minutes - it can be twisted into shape with less danger of it
| splitting and breaking. It is highly likely that this was
| done during Viking times - we know the technique was used to
| make "expanded" log boats, for example."_
| bregma wrote:
| Plucking sheep.
|
| You shear sheep, not pluck them. If you're experienced you can
| sheer about 100 sheep per day. You can skirt and wash the
| fleece of those same 100 sheep on day two. How are you spending
| the remaining 598 days?
|
| While I'm not an expert at spinning (although my spouse may
| be), I would venture that 12 or 15 village women carding and
| spinning 10 to 12 hours a day would be able to go from sheep to
| sail in about 3 months. Spindle spinning is very portable and
| something a woman would do during pretty much every spare
| moment when her hands were not busy doing something else.
| Making sails would have been a drop in the bucket when it came
| to yarn consumption since she also had to make all the clothes
| and cloth for other uses like sacking, ticking, blankets, etc.
| sbate1987 wrote:
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Plucking is the ancient form of sheering. You literally pull
| the hair off the sheep by hand. You aren't yanking it out by
| the roots, the shaft generally broke rather than the root put
| out of the skin, but I doubt the sheep enjoyed the process.
| In short: gathering wool from sheep was very different before
| ready acess to steel shears.
|
| https://www.chassagne.ca/index.php/the-croft-
| mainmenu-30/the...
|
| "Before the invention of shears, the sheep were plucked or
| "rooed", a Scandinavian word for plucking, and this tradition
| was still carried out on the Shetland Island until about
| forty years ago."
| AdamN wrote:
| 100 sheep per day ... with a flat blade since you don't have
| sheers yet ... while doing all the other chores required to
| maintain yourself ... accounting for the time it takes for
| the sheep to grow a coat long enough to sheer in the first
| place?
| Someone wrote:
| Shearing requires advanced technology that the Vikings may
| not have had. https://www.griggsagri.co.uk/blog/sheep-
| shearing-a-brief-his...:
|
| _"The sheep were shorn using very basic tools, such as
| metal, or sharp glass, fashioned into an implement to take
| whole clumps of wool off at once. Over time, the tools were
| adapted into scissor-like blades to make the job easier."_
|
| I think you can call that plucking. People use tools to pluck
| grapes, too.
|
| And 100 a day without a powered tool? Is that realistic?
| rags2riches wrote:
| These are examples of Viking era shears, found in what is
| now Sweden. I just did a quick search. Search words: sisare
| jarnalder.
|
| http://samlingarna.gotlandsmuseum.se/index.php/Detail/objec
| t...
|
| https://historiska.se/upptack-historien/object/364462-sax-
| si...
| [deleted]
| pdw wrote:
| 12-15 women working for 3 months is close to 4 person-years
| of work. That's higher than the numbers in Fenrisulfr's
| quote.
| duxup wrote:
| It doesn't strike me as surprising that the sail would take
| longer than the boat. The skill to make a boat is impressive
| but the mechanics of getting it done aren't enormous.
|
| Fabrics and sewing, gathering and prepping those materials and
| the tedious work seems enormous.
| taneq wrote:
| Reminds me of the comparison between computer software and
| hardware. Hulls are fairly linear. Sails are combinatorial.
| Ekaros wrote:
| The sewing of sail fabric is something different. You need to
| use heavy duty needle and force it through the fabric. It is
| somewhat similar I would imagine as dealing with leather.
|
| Wood work deals with big pieces comparatively.
| samstave wrote:
| edmundsauto wrote:
| All of human history is the same at its core. Suffering,
| exploration, profiteering. Yet we have progressed, bit by
| bit. We have a ways to go, but the arc of history is
| bending towards less suffering.
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| " but the arc of history is bending towards less
| suffering."
|
| I don't see it bending towards anything but increasingly
| vulgar, decadent, forms of violence.
| meristohm wrote:
| Less suffering for some of us, at least in the physical
| toiling sense and in the short term, but with more humans
| on the planet than ever before, and so many servings to
| funnel wealth to a minority, I reckon we're still
| collectively suffering quite a bit, with more to come as
| climate change exacerbates weather extremes and
| aberrations. And then there's the suffering of non-human
| animals. What we're doing doesn't feel like progress if I
| value ecological resilience through diversity, deep
| connection with the environment and my community, and a
| history unbroken for thousands of years.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| We have exploited our way into climate change, which
| entails more suffering.
| javajosh wrote:
| If we manage to exploit our way out of climate change, it
| will entail more suffering.
| bserge wrote:
| javajosh wrote:
| I bet weavers fought like hell against textile
| industrialization. I'm not an historian, but there _must_
| have been such a conflict, and given the scale of it I
| bet it was bloody. Industrialization freed them from this
| toil, but at the cost of centralizing the means of
| production. It is a strange thing, progress.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > It is a strange thing, progress.
|
| That time is correlated with progress is a very
| political-liberal idea, to no one's surprise.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I'm 90% sure you're telling a subtle joke, but on the off
| chance you're not "luddite" is worth a Google.
| Someone wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite:
|
| _"The Luddites were a secret oath-based organisation of
| English textile workers in the 19th century, a radical
| faction which destroyed textile machinery"_
| wongarsu wrote:
| The Luddites were a movement of British textile workers
| who fought industrialization, at first with sabotage then
| with open rebellion that was violently put down [1].
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I encourage you to watch some videos online of traditional
| (mostly hand-tools) Shipwrights. Even with the use of a
| bandsaw to do the rough milling, it is an arduous and lengthy
| process. Shipwrights also work with some of the longest
| planks of wood any form of woodworking does. In the days
| before machines, there would be scores of workers simply
| preparing the wood and getting it ready for the ship
| building.
|
| My hunch would be the reason shipbuilding is faster is it is
| easier to scale to multiple workers, and there are parts you
| can do in parallel.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > 100 meters square
|
| I think that might take a bit more than 154 km of yarn.
|
| Presumably you meant 100 square metre. :-)
| [deleted]
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _154 kilometers (60 miles)_
|
| 154 km = 95.7 mi
| bodhiandpysics1 wrote:
| a lovely little factoid is that in elizabethan england, a set of
| clothes could easily cost more than a house (Shakespeare paid a
| 60 pounds for the rather large house New Place, while a very
| fancy set of clothes could cost hundreds of pounds). This makes
| sense when you consider that the clothes could take more labor
| than the house!
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| So, the word "robber" is because they would strip you out of your
| robe?
| jacobolus wrote:
| Actually it is the opposite.
|
| The word "rob" comes from a proto-indo-european root meaning to
| "tear" or "strip", and has apparently been used in the modern
| sense of taking things by force for thousands of years,
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...
|
| The word "robe" is the derivative word, originally meaning the
| spoils of robbery, e.g. a stolen garment. It has only meant a
| specific kind of long loose garment for hundreds of years.
|
| The English words "rip", "reave", "bereave" also come from the
| same origin.
| glanzwulf wrote:
| Well, now that would depend on who's making the tunic. Is it a
| Armanicus? Or was it made by the fabled three stripe master,
| Adidacus?
| cwoolfe wrote:
| This is helpful context in understanding the saying: "If anyone
| would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as
| well." (Matthew 5:40) The ethic described in the modern
| vernacular is to "go the extra mile." (verse 41)
| amelius wrote:
| Clothing remains expensive, except we don't see the true cost.
| ska wrote:
| > Clothing remains expensive, except we don't see the true
| cost.
|
| Not really comparably. Lots of externalities and some weird
| market distortions, sure. But still, we're an order of
| magnitude or two cheaper now at minimum. Especially if you are
| comparing day-to-day functional clothing, where it's more
| likely 3.
| brianwawok wrote:
| More like three. Went from $1500 to $1.50. At a minimum wage
| job in the US, you can buy multiple shirts per hour worked.
| It would literally blow the mind of ancient people (maybe
| even moreso than something like a Computer), as it's
| something they have and work with - but the price is so
| different.
| ska wrote:
| Yes, I'm handwaving that even if you very conservatively
| estimate factoring back in for the externalized costs etc.,
| you still are a couple of orders at least for cheapest
| garments.
|
| i.e. the GP has a valid point but it doesn't undermine OP
| article at all. I expanded a little.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The idea that someone on a laborers salary could afford the
| material standard of people in much of the world today
| would be astonishing. My own grandmother grew up wearing
| clothes made from repurposed flour sacks, and that was only
| 90 years ago. The last two centuries of human progress are
| staggering to think about.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's a book called Why the West Rules--For now that
| basically explores the social development of the Western
| and Eastern cores since the dawn of civilization. One of
| the striking things in the book is that the author charts
| social development as measured by a formula with lots of
| variables. The kicker is that if you zoom out to look at
| the whole history, at that scale, the chart is basically
| flat-lined near zero until a couple hundred years ago.
| missedthecue wrote:
| flour and grain companies used to put floral designs on
| their sacks because they knew that buyers would repurpose
| the bags as clothing.
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4b/80/d6/4b80d65a7d8ebf737
| eed...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Yeah, that's a pretty neat bit of history. I wish I had
| some photos but alas the oldest photo of them I'm aware
| of is sometime after WWII.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Au contraire, it's even cheaper than portrayed. Even though a
| "basic tunic" today can be had for less than an hour of minimum
| wage work under very comfortable conditions, the price
| additionally covers advertising, intercontinental shipping,
| extensive regulatory compliance, extensive insurance, great
| HVAC, etc.
|
| Yes you can find "tragedy of the commons" and other concerns
| for modern production. Realize the tradeoffs, that ancient
| circumstances denied many benefits enjoyed today, that were we
| to subject workers today to those circumstances you'd be far
| more outraged.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| What hidden costs are accounting for the 2-3 orders of
| magnitude difference in clothing prices vs. minimum wages?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Basically only the sewing is done by hand now, and that's done
| with the aid of machines. That alone saves mountains of labor.
| Cotton has some problems with water and pesticide use, but it's
| insanely productive today even compared to 50 years ago. Even
| if you priced in every externality it would probably still be
| cheaper to buy a shirt today than it would have been 50 years
| ago.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Robbers in Italy or debt collectors in Egypt often stripped the
| clothes off their victims' backs,
|
| With regard to debt collection, what is interesting is the Bible
| requires that cloaks that were taken as collateral had to be
| returned by sunset so the person could sleep in them.
|
| Exodus 22:26 - If you take your neighbor's cloak as collateral,
| return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only
| covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in?
| etskinner wrote:
| Kind of contradicts the purpose of the collateral, doesn't it?
| Does the lender retrieve it as collateral again the next
| morning? Do they only make same-day loans?
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| My understanding was that the lender would the retrieve it
| again every morning.
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