How come we know so much about ancient philosophies from texts but there is so little information on technology acquisition?

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Ex. Roman Steam Engine, Greek Fire, Baghdad Batteries, Archimedes Heat Ray, Vitrification, Mechanical Robots

Why is there so little in ancient texts about this stuff?

In: Culture

Anonymous 0 Comments

You compare a complete field of studies against very specific technology. We know a lot about ancient technology, but some specific we don’t have much information for different reasons. Same with philosophy, we know a lot about it, but some specific writing were lost. In addition, we can really only know about philosophy through text, so if some of those were lost, we wouldn’t really know about it. But if a technology is lost, we can see know about it because some people saw that technology and talk about it in other writing, making us aware that something was lost. For the specific technology you talked about.

Roman Steam Engine or the Aeolipile was a cool concept, but it wasn’t practical. It was more of a party trick than anything else, so it make sense that not a lot of people wrote about it.

Greek Fire was a closely guarded formula, since it was a secret weapons of the Byzantine. So again, it make sense that we can’t find any writing about the specific formula. That said, greek fire isn’t something special that would be useful today. It was most likely a mixture of saltpeper, so would have been a early form of gunpowder, nothing special today or even 300 years ago. If the exact formula was know, we probably wouldn’t even talk about it, it’s mostly because of it’s unknown nature that it become interesting to people.

Baghdad batteries couldn’t have been powerful and there was not that much use to electricity back then, so like the Aoelipile this was most like not use on a large scale or particularly useful for pretty much anyone. There is controversy about it, some thing that what we found couldn’t really work, so maybe it was a failed experiment, other think they could use it for electroplating of metal, but with the possible power of these batteries and the fact that we don’t really have any mention of it anywhere else, mean that if there was a use to those batteries it was very small scale.

Archymedes heat ray was just focusing solar energy to heat something, it’s nothing that special about it and it was most likely not very pratical at the time. Again, a small invention that didn’t really have any impact and so people didn’t write about it much.

I couldn’t find much info on vitrification and I have no idea what you mean by mechanical robots. Those seem like conspiracy theory to me. Anyway most of what you talk about is mostly small technology that didn’t really work well or had minimal impact so nobody wrote about them or built them on a larger scale. Except for Greek Fire, but that was most likely a early for of gunpowder and it’s been hundred of years that we do better version of that stuff.