Category: Ancient History

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W is for Wind

…The North wind is the wind of satisfaction,
the South wind overthrows the men it hits,
the East wind is the wind that brings rain,
and the West wind is mightier than the man living there.

Sumerian proverb, @1900 BCE.
Soldiers of the 1st Chinese Regiment flying kites, China,1902. Photo courtesy University of Brisol.

In our alphabetic journey through Ancient Inventions, we are now into the last four letters, so I feel a bit of wind at my back. Which is good, since Wind is today’s topic–specifically, wind power and how ancient people used it.

In yesterday’s post on Valves, I described how ancient civilizations developed plumbing in order to control water. It is in the DNA of Homo sapiens–all the hominids–control the environment. We have always wanted to mold the world as we wished. What separated primates and apes in particular from other animals is tool use, and what seemed to caused hominids evolution was tool upon tool upon tool use. Fire-arrows-wheels-axes-thread-carrying slings all reflect continuous adaptation. We change things in the world to suit our needs until we try to shape the world into a tool for ourselves. This was modest 10,000 years ago with stone towers and calendars; bigger by the time of the pyramids, 5000 years ago. As of 2025 CE, it may be an experiment gone too far, now that the environment is fighting back.

However, in 3500 BCE, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and even in the South Pacific, people understood there were significant forces of nature and wanted at least to use them to their advantage. Diverting water and controlling it with valves could irrigate the crops and grow a hungry population; sailing across water could lead to places with new goods or resources. Fire was the life-giver to humans, known early on to the oldest of hominids, and staying with us through our evolving species. Shaping the earth into houses or bowls for food was part of daily life. But the air they breathed–could they control it? The wind brought storms that wrecked the crops and disturbed the cattle–could they harness it?

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U is for Umbrella

Oil paper umbrella, Chinese-design, shown in cave paintings from India, @200 BCE-600CE. From wikimedia.

Combine the histories and myths of Daedalus, Da Vinci, Archimedes, and St. Joseph into a single person. Now give that guy a wife, one who has learned some practical science from her husband. She invents the umbrella. Sort of.

The umbrella, a device used as a sun shade or rain cover, dates back to almost 3000 BCE. Since the ancient cultures that we know most cluster around the Mediterranean, the primary use of umbrella-like instruments was as fans or canopies to protect mainly the royals, and later the wealthy and aristocratic. Thus, the umbrella in the most ancient sense, was a status symbol.

But the other form of umbrella we modern people know is the collapsible kind–that is, those of us who experience rain in the north (or extreme south). Collapsible umbrellas, invented somewhere between 600 BCE and 50 CE in China, were also more symbolic than functional, at least according to art left behind. The Chinese led the world in innovative designs of the umbrella. Europeans came to know the designs; they just didn’t use them. At least, not until umbrellas were re-invented as a status symbol, eventually to make their way into popular and practical use by schmoes like you and me.

In focusing on the history of the umbrella in ancient times, let’s consider:

  1. What were umbrellas for?
  2. Where and when were umbrellas used in ancient history?
  3. What does the invention and innovation of the umbrella signify?
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T is for Trepanation

From Switzerland, @3500 BCE, Bronza Age. A woman’s skull had been drilled, and she had survived for some time afterward. Photo by Rama.

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in
And stops my mind from wandering
Where it will go
I’m filling the cracks that ran through the door
And kept my mind from wandering
Where it will go

“Fixing a Hole,” McCartney/Lennon.

Archaeology was a pretty new discipline in the 18th and 19th century, so perhaps we can forgive the excavators who kept finding skulls with holes and tossing them aside. Oh, there’s another that’s been bashed in the head, poor bugger. Communication was a lot slower in, say, 1820, so they didn’t all talk to each other. They didn’t have a chat room where they could all post examples of what they’d found, to suddenly realize that Geez!, there were hundreds of these, and all over the world: Russia, China, Germany, France–especially France–Egypt, Greece, Peru–most especially Peru!

The key advance, if you will, came in 1867 in the Andes, when an artifact collector in South America named George Squiers wrote to an eminent French brain expert named Paul Broca. The rest is trepanation history. Because it turns out that 10,000 years ago, brain surgery was practiced, and it was practiced nearly everywhere.

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