The Ancients Were More Advanced Than We Suspect There are a lot of amazing things about ancient times. They range from the abilities of the ancients to their way of living. If we check the historical records we find out the ancient Greeks, Indians and others were performing operations and people were surviving. Today we go for cataract operations when necessary and we think wow this is great that modern medicine can do this for us, but for thousands of years cataract operations were taking place successfully. As if that wasn’t enough some races had plastic surgeons. Seems impossible doesn’t it, but they did. They also had ways of anesthetizing people, which seems to have been lost in later years. While we know the ancients didn’t know about germs, there are plenty of records which show many of them knew if they didn’t keep a wound clean it could kill. One thing I have mentioned before is the fact if some of the ancient advancements hadn’t been lost to history we would have advanced a lot further and faster with technology. I always like to give the example of the Aeolipile. The Aeolipile was the first steam engine. It was a ball filled with water over a fire which had an escape valve on each side and as the water in the ball heated the jets of steam coming out of the ball would make it spin. The water was drawn from a base which was filled and the fire was under the base. It was invented by Hero of Alexandria. We are talking about a steam engine which was invented about 2,000 years ago and the invention was never recognized for what a great thing it was. Imagine if it would have been improved and applied for use in driving mechanical devices. We might have had steam trains in the first or second century. The ancient Greeks have been credited with writing the first plays, but the ancient Chinese and Indians might also have had plays and such. In a time of Kings, the ancient Greeks discovered democracy of sorts. The ancient Indians it is said discovered the concept of zero although this is disputed. There is one thing which cannot be disputed and it is the ancients were incredible engineers and some of the structures they built we cannot equal today because we have no knowledge of how they moved such gigantic stones. Aside from that aspect the artistic work on some of the structures is second to none as is the accuracy of alignment. The Great Pyramid is so accurately built one engineer said he doubted if they built it today it would be so accurate. It is only about one-half inch off when measuring one side against the other. We keep finding out the human race is older than we thought. The dates are continuously being adjusted backwards when talking about settlements and fossils of humans. There was a long period where it seemed humans did nothing but try and survive. Why did it take so long for us to get to know things like building, farming and such? Could it be because we were a sparse population and any discoveries made were not passed to other groups and eventually the original group where they were made died out? There must have been people who were curious about things. Another problem might have been we all died so young we didn’t have as much of a chance to discover things, we were too busy running from wild animals and other human groups who were trying to take what we had. Many times, I have spoken about some of the incredible inventions which were made which seemed to be impossible due to the period of time when they were discovered. Could there have been more things invented which could change our lives today if we found out about them? An example of this is flexible glass. It is legendary but many believe it existed. Supposedly the story goes the Roman Emperor Tiberius Caesar who reigned between 14 CE and 37 CE was approached by an inventor who had made a bowl out of flexible glass. The emperor took the bowl and threw it against the floor but it didn’t shatter it dented. At that point the inventor lifted the bowl and took out a small hammer and took the dent out. The Emperor asked the inventor if anyone else knew about this invention and he replied no. The next thing the Emperor did was have the man beheaded. He did this because he was afraid this material would undermine the price of gold. Another incredible ancient invention was an elixir developed by the Roman emperor Mithradates VI Eupator Dionysus and his physician Crateuas. We believe the elixir existed because it was spoken about by some of the great Roman intellectuals such as Pliny the Elder. The elixir was developed because the emperor had many enemies and was convinced he was going to be poisoned as his father was. The concoction was developed after much trial and error and supposedly contained 54 different ingredients which could protect the emperor from all known poisons. It had been tested on prisoners until the doctor had gotten it right. It was called Mithridatium and the formula has been lost to history. It is said the emperor would take the supplement every day and sometimes give public demonstrations proving poison could not harm him. Many of us do not give the ancients credit for their intelligence and their technology. I have always said I wonder what inventions they made which we do not know about? Perhaps there are some which would still be useful to us today. We should not write the ancients off as far as technology goes, because they have proved they were capable of some incredible stuff.
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