LOST & FOUND #3 …

Excellent Reading:
--- The Lost Discoveries from the beginning of Recorded History to the Renaissance --- Lost Discoveries - Dick Teresi.

LOST & FOUND
#3 Recording History

  • Sumer ~5,000 B.C. - begin written chronicle! - this is the beginning of humankind recording history!
  • Difference in techological progress between prior hunter gatherers and Sumerians is less than Sumerians and themselves
  • Changes in Technology began with grinding & polishing stone tools - ended with smelting metal
  • In between Stone Age & Metal Age:
    • barnyard animals domesticated
    • writing (3500 B.C.)
    • build cities in 3000 B.C.: first may have been Uruk, now Iraq, 50,000 population (brick, arches, domes, Ziggurat temples on mountains of bricks, usually in 7 layers
  • Sumerians: wool into cloth, flax into linen, canals, WHEEL (3500 B.C.: pottery wheel, carts, moving, chariots & other engines of war), writing
  • 2500 B.C. - first free standing glass objects (Mesopotamia & Egypt)
  • King Hammurabi ~ 1775 B.C. Babylonian Empire (out of merged Sumerians and conquering Acadians) makes code of laws
  • ~1600 B.C. Hittites, from Black and Caspian Seas, invade Babylonia - probably first with smelted iron and wheeled military machines (probably precursor to gear & axle used a few centuries later for water powered corn mills) - also mined and traded copper and silver
  • Asyerians take over and first to outfit armies with iron 700 B.C.
  • Asyerians build city of Nineveh from tax money from conquered lands (destroyed in 612 B.C. by Chaldeans, Meads, & Persians): clay tablet library, double walls 50' thick x 100' high

Questions

  1. Where and when do some think that the recording of history started?
    5,000 B.C. in Sumeria
  2. Which is the larger technological change (according to Teresi): from humans being hunter/gatherers - to the Stone Age, or from the Stone Age - to the Metal Ages?
    Stone to Metal
  3. What does the decreasing amounts of times between ages mean about the Speed of Change?
    that the speed of change is accelerating
  4. When do we think humankind used the wheel? and for what?
    3500 B.C.: pottery wheel, carts, moving, chariots & other engines of war
  5. Can you name a technology that was just created recently – but could have been created in ancient times?
    Electric motor, electric generator, computer