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
the fact that we can’t drink sea water even tho its the most common type of water just bc its 3% salt yet we can safely consume multiple forms of literal poison and even benefit from doing so just blows my fucking mind
So, last time, I forgot to add that there was an elk, too.
This time: Ten cats, five raccoons, three dogs, a frog, a snake, a hawk, a deer and a fox. (It was a weird night.)
Firefighter demonstrates how to put out a kitchen fire
Reblog to actually save a life
To explain. The latter works because you’re cutting off the supply of oxygen to the fire and suffocating it
as opposed to slapping oxygen inside the pan with the downward motion
Reblogging, because this is so important. When I was learning how to cook for myself in my tweens, I had at least a five years of fire safety seminars from school drilling this into my head, and I STILL had that instinctive put-the-fire-out-with-water reflex. Didn’t even think. I saw our oily burner catch fire after frying eggs, whipped around towards the sink for water, and my brain immediately screamed NO!!! NO WATER!
I mean that fire safety stuff straight up bitchslapped me out of REFLEXIVELY setting my house on fire. I found a pot lid and inched it over the burner before turning off the heat. Even if you think you know this stuff, panic is powerful shit. Make knowledge more powerful.
I love how humans have literally not changed throughout history like the graffiti from Pompeii has people from hundreds of years ago writing stuff like “Marcus is gay” “I fucked a girl here” “Julius your mum wishes she was with me” and leonardo da vinci’s assistants drew dicks in their notebooks just for the banter and mozart created a piece called “kiss my ass” so when people wish for ‘today’s generation’ to be like ‘how people used to’ then we’re already there buddy we’ve always been
The Hagia Sophia has inscriptions that were considered sacred for centuries until they were deciphered in the 70s to be Nordic runes saying “Halfdan wrote this”
my old english prof told us that theres a cave in Scandinavia where a viking gratified some runes like 14 feet up on the wall and when they finally reached it all it translated into was “this is very high”
Ancient Shitposting
Now on the History Channel
‘People have literally just always been people’ is genuinely my favorite fact about the world
“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 BC – 43 BC
so not nearly as old but, this is a 12th century stave church in lom, norway (one of less than 40 left in the world)
it’s hard to see, but in the top left corner of this photo where the light comes in from the window, there’s a runic inscription
these photos show it more clearly, it’s easier to see in person. so of course one of the people i was travelling with asked what it said, and we were told it basically translates to:
“on this day, I climbed to this point, in the corner of the church”
Want to be terrified AND enraged AND ALSO worry about mosquitos BUT learn about historical plagues AND ALSO why anti-vaxxers do like they do? Have I got the article for you!
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