Tag: #AncientHistory

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V is for Valve

Ancient Roman bronze valve, from Valve magazine. Photo credit: Ministry for Better Cultural Activities — Superintendent for Archaeological Good of Naples and Pompeii

Indoor plumbing doesn’t get enough credit. We take it for granted, but one night spent camping is always enough for me to write fan letters to my en suite bathroom at home. In fact, plumbing as a whole doesn’t get enough credit. Prehistorians love to wax lyrical about the plow or cave paintings or Platonic ideals. They should be talking about irrigation. After all, find a sizeable population in history, and you’ll probably find a valve.

The Romans kind of cornered the historical air time on valves since they were the gold standard (Bronze standard? it’s the Bronze Age…) for plumbing as well as central heating. Numerous articles cover this in Valve magazine, and yes, there’s a magazine dedicated to valves. However, while we should give the Romans their due, the Egyptians were the first to use valves in irrigation, the Indus Valley builders of the largest public baths, the Mesopotamians creators of one fabulous desert garden after another, and the Incans masters of harnessing gravity to create waterfalls and canals.

Harnessing the power of water was one of humanity’s first ways of controlling their environment. The valve was an integral part of the story, such a simple little thing but very powerful. The best inventions are. Let’s consider:

  1. What is a valve?
  2. When and where were valves first introduced in ancient civilizations?
  3. What does the creation of the valve and the control of water imply about human thinking?
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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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S is for Ship

Grecian urn 475 BCE depicting Odysseus’ ship, a classic Greek merchant ship that plied the Mediterranean in ancient times. Photo by ArchaiOptix.

The oldest ship in the world that still survives is Dutch. The second oldest is from Africa. They date back to 8000-6000 BCE. This should seem curious because, as we have been looking at the big picture this month, we have seen ancient inventions that go back to the beginning of human existence. We know that somewhere, 100,000 to 30,000 ya, early humans migrated out of Africa, north to Europe, and east to Asia. They didn’t stop there. They kept going down through Southeast Asia and out into the Pacific Islands: Micronesia, Guinea, and Australia. Potentially, 60,000 years ago.

They didn’t walk.

You can talk about land bridges and ice bridges until you’re blue in the face. People did not walk all the way throughout or across the Pacific, even though that has been the dominant narrative for decades. Indonesia was inhabited 32,000 years ago, and at best it was 60 miles from the nearest bit of land back then. There are 10,000-year-old Japanese-style pots in Ecuador and Chilean sweet potatoes in Polynesia.

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