I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”
For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.
The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.
Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”
Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.
In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.
Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.
But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.
It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.
3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.
So moral of story is be specific
I was thinking it was stupid that they didn’t specify seawater but then I had the thought that we don’t specify to use chicken eggs in baking because DUH so we just write eggs
2000 years in the future people are going to be making scrambled fish eggs and crying bc the ancient recipes make no sense
me any time someone tries to show me a meme on facebook or instagram that i already watched die on tumblr:
uhm
i posted this on both tumblr and twitter, someone stole it, put it on imgur, someone stole it from them, they put it on reddit, and then you came on my own damn post and accused me of stealing the WONDERS never CEASE
A BOTTLE containing a mystery liquid dating back to the time of
Jesus Christ has been hailed as a “unique” discovery after being
unearthed in Russia.
The 2,000-year-old artefact was uncovered on the site of the Phanagoria city, which was founded in the 6th century BC.
The ancient city was the largest Greek settlement on the Taman peninsula in the present-day Krasnodar Krai region of Russia.
The extraordinary object was discovered in the grave of a warrior in the Eastern Necropolis of the city.
It is filled with a mystery liquid which has not been identified.
Vladimir Kuznetsov, head of the expedition, described the discovery as “unique”.
He
said: “The discovery of the large glass filled with unknown liquid in
the sarcophagus of the Phanagorian horseman warrior is unique.”
The
discovery is the first of its kind, with Mr Kuznetsov revealing that
bottles previously found have been empty or full of soil.
He said: ”There are hundreds of similar bottles that were found in Phanagoria before that did not have the liquid.
“They were either empty or filled with soil.”
The large glass bottle contains a clear liquid with dark sediment at the bottom.
The discovery is the first time the expedition team have found liquid to have survived for that length of time.
Mr Kuznetsov said: “This is the first time me or my colleagues are seeing a liquid surviving that long.”
For what it’s worth, 2018 has been a really terrible year for the world,
but it’s been a really great year for archeologists digging up and
opening things that will unleash unspeakable eldritch horrors upon
humanity.
OPEN IT OPEN IT OPEN IT! Release whatever djinn or daemon it is!
DONT OPEN IT. 72 is a better number than 73. I don’t like prime numbers.
Don0303 