Tag: #AncientHistory

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O is for Oncology

Offering to the Egyptian deity, Imhotep, god of medicine and architecture. Painting by Ernest Board, 1912.

There is no treatment…

From an Egyptian medical text @1600 BCE describing removal of breast cancer tumor.

As a disease of the cells, cancer is likely the oldest disease on Earth. Oncology is the study of cancer, of tumors specifically, since tumors are how cancer shouts Hey, I’m here! to the body. Cancerous tumors have been found on fossils, both dinosaurs and fish from earlier ages. As soon as there were cellular life forms, there must have been cancer.

Before I go any further, F#CK Cancer. Though it’s not really cancer’s fault, that’s just what it is. It’s part of the natural world, and Mother Nature makes the rules, not me. Even so, F#CK Cancer.

I don’t know any Egyptian swear words, so I can’t translate that into hieroglyphics for you. But the Egyptians knew about cancer, as did the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese. Other than finding skeletons with tumors, what we know now about what they knew then comes from what they wrote. And what they wrote shows that this scourge of our modern health system has been a scourge since they put up stone towers and started figuring out how to make bread.

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N is for Numbers

Blackadder: Right Baldrick, let’s try again shall we? This is called adding. If I have two beans, and then I add two more beans, what do I have?
Baldrick: Some beans.
Blackadder: Yes… and no. Now try again. One, two, three, four. So how many are there?
Baldrick: Three.
Blackadder: What?
Baldrick: …and that one.
Blackadder: Three and that one.  Let’s try again shall we? I have two beans, then I add two more beans. What does that make?
Baldrick: A very small casserole.

Blackadder episode, “Head”
Student geometry problem in Babylonian cuneiform @1500 BCE. Photo by Rama in the Louvre.

Yes, dear readers, there will be math today. I know you can do it. I know you can run intellectual circles around Baldrick.

The definitive work on this topic is The History of Mathematics by Merzbach and Boyer, which is already in a Third Edition, even though not much has changed for the Egyptians and Sumerians, who used what we’d consider basic counting systems to construct giant pyramids. Mainly, Merzbach and Boyer have added a “Logic and Computing” and “Recent Trends” chapters at the end. Remember when Computer Science was about logic and not Belarussians creating algorithms to stuff your social media full of outrage porn? How quaint!

Anyway, I digress. Today, I want to describe how different cultures approached numbers–not specifically whether they were smart enough to figure out Fermat’s theorem or Poincare’s theory–but how we as humans figured out what Baldrick apparently couldn’t. Thinking about math is hard, but we’ll also see that there are harder and easier ways to do it.

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M is for Music

Bone flute, from Germany @43,0000 ya, Photo by Cangminzho.

It warms the cockles of my heart to know that music was invented before royal government archives. Much as I am in favor of libraries, yesterday’s topic, I don’t think we need the blow-by-blow details of every king’s battle conquests as much as we need music. Whether it’s a single fiddle playing out “Danny Boy” or a full-blown choir and symphony, ringing out with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” music reaches the heart and mind at once.

Archaeomusicologists must be very jealous of art archaeologists. While we might debate, as we did with the “Kiss,” whether a 15,000-year-old smear of paint was two people or a moose, at least we have a picture. We don’t have any recordings of 30,000-year-old flute or kithara players, and there’s disagreement over whether bits of bone and stone are even instruments. Yet, by the time the great cities of the world built their palaces–in Assyria, Memphis, Knossos, the Indus Valley, or Shaanxi–music was a significant part of the culture. We can see paintings of musicians and dancers and know that there must have been intricate choreography and complex arrangements. Somehow, we got from a couple of holes in a bear femur to Coachella, Egyptian-style.

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