The Pyramids - for generations Engineers were unable to explain how these towering monuments to the greatness of kings, Ships to bear the soul of the departed to the after life, were constructed.

The answer appears to be 'More Whips'

Hydraulic cement - the Romans again. A secret lost until the 19th century

The Nazca Lines - still pretty inexplicable.

And finally, to quote Eric Von Danniken - "How did the ancients manage to create such perfect sculptures of the Human skeleton when X-rays were not developed for another 2000 years?"

Whimsically,
Pat

Their knowledge of the Earth's circumference, spherical trigonometry.....the riddle of longitude.

The Piri Reis map....etc.


Most of all,  I am impressed with their resolute determination in having intermittently solved the simplest 'equation'....


"You have not because you ask not."



Peace,


TS

 As I tell people over and over at the Medieval Demos I do-- They were not dumb people, it's just that the level of technology was different. Theirs was more muscle and brains based, rather than computer.
 More things to add to amazing things you didn't know they had.
 
  Pocket calculator Roman, before the abacus.

  Air mattresses- skins of animals sewn together in a bag, waterproofed, and then attatched to a bellow. Used by soldiers on campaign for quick beds

 Hand crank paddleboats- ancient
 
  Floating portable bridges

Badgerdude,  you may want to rethink that whole Roman calculator predating the Abacus, thing.


Hand cranked paddleboats......not seen that one.


Peace,

TS
8)

P. James and N. Thorpe; Ancient Inventions.

"How did the ancients manage to create such perfect sculptures of the Human skeleton when X-rays were not developed for another 2000 years?"  

How about some time?!

TLM

High temperature mold casting?  eww.  Wouldn't put it past'em.


:o

Techstuf,. i'd be happy to post my refernces on this stuff if you're interested.

I am interested.


TS

Quite a few mysteries have been about how the romans could launch a rock 900 meters with seige engines, that, if the same size of the medieval ones, could only throw a rock 2/3 as far? I almost don't know how the romans could make suchan effiecient machine, so as to do that. Just crazy.

indoor plumbing
baths
running water
bridge the length of 6 football fields in 8 days
COLLESEUM
arches
aqueducts
roads
road cambers
retractable roof (for colleseum)
indoor (sort of) naval battles

all done by the romans, it would take us years to do some of the things they did in days, ponder that for awhile
         Drum Slinger A.K.A Roman Nut

I dearly would like to know how they made greek fire.

" I'd presume that a lot of things like the volcanic sand cement that cures underwater in molds (sorry I don't know any references to go read about this) and so many other neat and inexplicable things probably were like some of the best technology today"

Sorry to disappoint you but the "secret" of roman cement is well known and can easily be copied if needed..  We have even better ones now.  Only if they are 0.5% more expensive than the ubiquitous portland cement you are not going to see them in commercial use.   Google for "ceramicrete".

TLM

Quote:

Sorry to disappoint you

Don't know about Funslinger, but I wasn't disappointed at all.....leave it to those Romans!


Ubiquos,  is that spanish?


;)

" Ubiquos,  is that spanish? "

No, just heavily misspelled and a few letters left out for some reason.   :P

TLM

Did some corrections on my lousy spelling

People two thousand years ago were as intelligent (or not ) as we are.  Roman concrete with all probability was not the result of research but an accidental discovery.  But they recognized a good thing when they saw one.

Romans were pretty good engineers in spite of their cumbersome number system.

TLM

Sorry it took a while to respond, I had to search through my research papers
 For the pocket calculator.\

A cultural history of numbers- Karl Menninger 1969 MIT Press
History of the abacus- JM Pullan
The Roman hand abacus- www.ee.ryeson.ca/'elf/abacu-roman-handabacus.htmc

Hand cranked paddleboats

On Matters of War  anonymous-c.370A.D.

History of Technology, vol.II - Charles Singer Oxford University Press

Cathedral, forge and waterwheel Frances&Joseph Gies 1994 Harper Periodical.

Brunelleschi's Dome  Ross King 2000 Walker& co.  

Badgerdude,  Praytell, where in your research papers does it reveal the secret as to how the romans managed to retroactively predate the Chinese or Babylonian abacus at 3,000BC ?


Peace,


TS

Actually the reason ancients were so good at things that we have lost, is very simple. We write things down and have lost the apprentice system. Most roman or babylonian or egyptian craftsmen were the product of hundreds of generations of dedicated craftsmen all with their own secrets that were only handed down to their apprentices.
As soon as you create a single pool of knowlege you essentially kill the hiearchy of knowlege and people start from scratch with the central pool.
ie: essentailly everyone starts at level two - not level two hundred.
And of course the last of the masters would not have written down anything like all their knowlege - so essentially we are starting at a much lower knowlege level than any ancient craftsman would have had to.

Then there's technology, once you lose the neccessity of doing things by hand and start standardising things with machines you lose the essential drive to innovate that the hand based craftsman has.

In short (and a lovely irony) the rise of technlogy and the ability to store knowlege outside of a human brain was the direct cause of the loss of a great deal of the knowlege that the written word was meant to preserve.  

And nobody knows how to make greek fire - my personal theory is simply that in it's myth it's attributed qualities that it actually did not possess and was in all probabllity just a form of napalm.

Nescessity is the mother of invention. ;D

According to JM Pullan, in the History of the Abacus--
" The similarity of the Roman bead frames ( another name for the abacus) and those used in some Eastern countries suggests that the use of such insturments spread in some way from Rome to China, and thence to Russia and Japan."  p. 20
  It should also be noted that the oldest of the Roman versions did not have Roman numerals on it. It had Chaldicic, which was an ancient pre Roman civilization in Sicily. If that was the earliest one, where did they get it from the East?

Rome wasn't even founded until around 753BC at the earliest.   The abacus, in various forms, has been dated to as far back as 3,000BC.....so, technically your source's speculation might have validity, but only insofar as the possible sharing of a particular design, based on a device already known to exist much earlier.



Peace,


TS

Early sculpture was accurate anatomically because there were plenty of dead people to take apart and see how they were put together. Anatomical study has been going on for a long long time.

What about megaliths...I still havent heard an answer for those.

Though we may not understand how some of that technology was made possible, do you think a caveman like Shanidar 1 or Jondalar would understand the concept of how the internet works or how a plane flies without a great deal of brain power? Different intelligences for different eras.

Not quite bjarn - the same intelligence just different knowlege. And how many people alive today could properly explain how the internet works or how an aeroplane flies ?
Not many.
Megaliths have been transported and the circles built using various muscle power methods recently, no doubt the ancients did it more efficiently, they'd had the practice. But it's explainable and repeatable.

I meant different knowledges, just bad wording on my part.

I can see making dolmens easy to repeat but the larger stones, it must have taken a lot of people to move them into the desired position.

Some people say the paleolithic cro magnons were primitive and childish but maybe it just took a lot of practise with things like art and music to be able to draw or play flute like we do now and they werent so primitive back then at all?

hey this is 14 m tn and this has nuthin to do with ancient weapons but wat is a weight u put in ur hand to punch sum 1 with it makes ur fist heavier?

wat is it called i mean?

Bjarn, you are right there.
The technology they used was alike what we call childish now, but they had to work hard to learn it. There were no books with pictures and any project that had not been done in someones lifetime must have been done by memory of the stories about them. And nothing was standardized, so even musical instruments had to be made and learned to play on by trial and error.

Willeke

PS, Jack, read in the other primitive weapon section and you will find answeres on all questions you have asked here.