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Several hundred years ago, a group of Maori set sail from New Zealand into the unknown South Pacific. Whether by luck or skill, they landed on a remote archipelago known now as the Chatham Islands, some 500 miles away. They lost all contact with their fellow tribesmen on New Zealand and formed a tight-knit, egalitarian community known as the Moriori and lived in peace for over 100 years.
Then, one day in the 1830s, a group of Maori, who had by this point established contact with English settlers, hitched a ride on a seal-hunting ship and sailed back to the same island. Seeing its potential as a settlement, the Maori, as was their custom, slaughtered or enslaved every single Moriori. The Moriori did not fight back; they had never known violence.
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Back in 401 BC, Cyrus I, a usurper to the Persian throne hired ten thousand Greek mercenaries to help him in his takeover. Starting in Sardes on the Ionian coast, Cyrus and the Army of the Ten Thousand, as they were bad-assedly known, enjoyed a successful campaign across the Persian empire until Cyrus was killed at the battle of Cunaxa. The Ten Thousand (their numbers now around 6,500) were then betrayed by Tissaphernes, one of Cyrus' allies and their generals were captured and executed.
Instead of surrendering, the Ten Thousand elected their own leaders and went about the business of fighting their way out of the empire to the Black Sea port of Trebizond, over 400 miles away, across deserts and through mountains, fighting off the Persian army the entire way. If you have ever read a book or seen a movie about a stranded army fighting its way out of hostile territory, it is based on what Xenophon the soldier-philosopher wrote of their adventures in the book Anabasis.
As I recall, he used a known distance from a city where high noon on a specific day would have a standing poll cast no shadow to another city on the same day with a poll which did cast a shadow and used all of that information to calculate the circumference.Quote:
In about 240 B.C.E., the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes calculated, with astounding accuracy for his time, the circumference of the earth. According to Wikipedia, he came up with the measurement of about 252,000 "stadia." Though the exact size of said "stadion" is in dispute, historians believe he would have used the measurement of the then contemporary Egyptian stadion; he did after all, conduct his measurements in Egypt. Such a stadion would have measured about 157.5 meters, which puts his measurement for the earth's circumference at about 39,690 kilometers, astoundingly close to our current measurement of 40,075 km.
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Basil I was born as an Armenian peasant to parents held captive by the Bulgarian Khan. He eventually escaped back to Byzantine territory and became the Byzantine emperor Michael III's bodyguard and companion due to his wrestling prowess. Michael eventually raised Basil up to be co-emperor. When Michael began to favor another courtier, Basil assassinated him and became the sole emperor of one of the most powerful empires in the world.
Basil ruled for almost 20 years. The Byzantines considered him one of their greatest emperors and the dynasty he founded ruled over a Byzantine Golden Age. Not too shabby.
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The time difference between when Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus lived is greater than the time difference between Tyrannosaurus and now.
The time difference between the building of the great pyramids and Cleopatra's reign is greater than the time between Cleopatra's reign and today.
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File:KanishkaBuddha2.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It dates to the 200s AD, and is from the Kushan Empire in what's now Afghanistan and Pakistan. On it is written "BODDO" in Greek letters ... around a figure readily recognizable as Buddha.
Around the same time that Christianity was taking over the Roman Empire, there was a Greek-speaking Buddhist civilization in central Asia. These were the ancestors of the folks who built those giant Buddha statues that the Taliban blew up a few years ago. They spoke the same language as classical Western civilization; they certainly traded with the Roman Empire.
There never was a hard boundary between "Eastern" and "Western" civilizations, and there are not hard boundaries between nations or cultures today. There was, and is, a constant exchange of ideas, goods, language, and people amongst adjacent human settlements throughout the world.
People are not even remotely so different from one another as they pretend to be.
And my personal favorite from this thread Biggest History Mindfucks? : AskRedditQuote:
In Australia, the Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayore people use compass directions for every spatial cue, for example, "There is an ant on your southeast leg." The people's traditional greeting is "Where are you going?", essentially requiring that each person be familiar with the cardinal directions at all times. Perhaps as a result, these people have been shown to be more skilled at dead reckoning than any other population: when asked to order a set of picture cards, they instinctively arrange them not from left to right or right to left, but from east to west, no matter what direction they are facing.
Why read the paper in the morning when you can read the internet?Quote:
The Temple at Gobleki Tepe
In Turkey, there is an empty, uninhabited region overlooked by a ridge of mountains. On a hill at the base of those mountains is a temple unique in human history.
Gobleki Tepe is a series of temples, built on top of each other over time. The oldest of 'layer' of temples is more than 11 000 years old.
That's not just seven thousand years older than the Pyramids. Five thousand years older than the first cities in the fertile crescent.
It's a thousand years before agriculture. The builders were nomads, living off of herds and foraging.
It's before writing. So the whole thing was built by people whose knowledge had to be learned entirely in their lifetime and committed to memory. Can you imagine building a house with a group of people, when there aren't any diagrams or written instructions on length or weight? And the project took more than just your lifetimes? (Okay, maybe there were measured lengths of rope or something, but still.)
So it existed almost alone on Earth, with no large permanent human settlements. Not in the middle of a city, or even near one, or at a time when our concept of 'cities' even existed. There are barely signs that people even lived at the site. It indicates humans who used it lived in nomadic villages nearby and it stood mostly empty. It was unimaginably unique at the time.
We only think it was a temple because it was full of larger-than-life statues of humans and dozens of different animals. The concept of a bigger-than-life statue indicates respect and reverence, when it was believed that humans weren't sophisticated enough at the time to see themselves as gods, or worthy of worship.
We know that Gobleki Tepe was in continuous use for more than three thousand years, and then buried. Not in an avalanche, not in a fire or storm. By hand. The entire fucking complex was buried by hand. We know from the striations of earth that it was carried in from the land around and dumped. And it wasn't destroyed first, the buildings was intact.
Only 5% has been excavated. It's been picked at for decades because of competing claims on archeological rights. Who knows what else is in there.
Göbekli Tepe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
