Ancient things that blow your mind

Gobekli Tepe. The fact that hunter-gatherers were organized and sophisticated enough culturally to construct stone monuments that large and intricate boggles my mind. Their use (for now we assume it was a mortuary center with some religious ritual sprinkled in) is highly specialized, which totally doesn't fit with the common conception of nomadic hunters following their quarry. The stone carvings indicate a highly developed sense of aesthetic. There is no prehistoric place I'd rather visit, save maybe the homeland of the proto Indo-Europeans.

Isn't Gobekli Tepe a proto Indo-European construct?

NoSo you wanna visit a wasteland?

They werent hunter gatherers, agriculture is just older than previously thought

Sri Lanka was connected to india by land until like 600 years ago.

"No"

Antikythera Mechanism

We traded with the world for a long time
We had greeks chinks and arabs visit us
We even found roman coins here

The Portuguese brought chili's from South America to Goa, and with this, curry was created in India.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam's_Bridge

meant for

What's so mindblowing?

Long distance trade has been a thing for a while.

Yes you retard, don't just spout shit without doing basic research.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam's_Bridge

ive never heard anyone say that

The highly renowned "Moroccan leather" used in Southern Europe actually came from the Hausa tribe in West Africa

Also, Corinthian leather?
Not actually from Corinth

The Romans would send one hundred and twenty trade ships or thereabouts to India quite frequently.

The Hittite double headed eagle, a bronze age symbol of power has been used by countless European empires and some nations use it to this day

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

>tomatoes are a New World crop

Italy is in shambles

Ancient Greeks would sail down to Tanzania.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_the_Navigator

And even more than this. the fact that no one tried doing it again until the Portuguese

>Sardinia wasn't settled until the 1700s
This is the dumbest thing on Veeky Forums by a country mile.

Not even slightly surprising, given the extensive trade between the Harrapans and th Sumerians.

>not knowing of this gem in Veeky Forumstory
Welcome to the board, new friends.

Sorry, meant

Why is this so common throughout history among so many nations

looks cool

19 000 Persian silver coins made their way to Sweden in 1200s, as has been found in a single hoard.

It doesnt exist in nature though so how can two countries so far away so long ago both come up with the same symbol?

iirc it pops up in mysore, egypt, germany babylon etc

Idioms have been common for a long time

>What's cooler than an eagle with one head?
>An eagle with two heads!
It probably has to do with ancient man not being satisfied with the symmetry of depictions of eagles with one jead and so adding a second head to balance the depiction, plus it permanently settles any controversy over which way the eagle should be looking to the right or to the left.

On top of that you've prevented enemies from capturing actual eagles and using them to mock your symbolism by elevating your symbolic bird beyond mere physical realm.

Isn't it so odd that old maps use modern coastlines?

I'm fairly certain we'll discover evidence of ancient electroplating sooner than later.

Gold on lead, obviously.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery

apparently some arab merceneries made their way into the middle of china during the an lushan rebelion and got rewarded with status and residency by the tang emperor for helping against the rebel

>Archaeologist Ken Feder commented on the show noting that no archaeological evidence has been found either for connections between the jars (which were necessary to produce the required voltage) or for their use for electroplating.

That's even right on the Wiki page. The "Baghdad batteries" weren't batteries; a German archaeologist just fudged the design of some storage vessels to make a more interesting find. Just like lots of other things in this thread, it's complete bullshit that people keep repeating because they don't actually know much about archaeology besides stuff they see on psuedoscience blogs and the history channel.

A hoard of Roman coins was discovered in a castle on the Ryuku Islands in Japan

A Buddhist idol was found in a Scandinavian treasure hoard

One Chinese emperor was gifted with a giraffe from a Somali prince

Not that weird considering that Tang and the Caliphate shared a border and fought at least one war. Tibet was on the muslim's side by the way.

>WE

So is the double-headed eagle in that stone Hittite or Mesoamerican?

Hittite

Hittite, the image is wrong. Eagles didn't even exist in America at that time, they were brought from Europe like horses and cows.

No my malagasy ancestors traded cinnamon and it's been written as such in history.

It's the pre-austronesian ancestors know as vazimba who went in double outrigger canoes. The evidence is still found in Maldives where our techniques are still used there rather than Indian/Arab techniques.

I always find Damascus steel cool

>Romans get a bunch of awesome carbon steel to go conquer the Mediterranean with
>traders say it's from Damascus because they don't want the Romans to be able to bypass them
>turns out that the steel was made in enormous steelworks in Sri Lanka, with the fans powered by the monsoon winds

Thanks. Now I see the Tenochtitlan foundation legend is fake news.

No, before te Age of discovery you could only travel by coast I very much doubt the island was even settled at the time, you could only go there with modern (at least renaissance) technology

Yeah, it'd take decades

>German archaeologist just fudged the design of some storage vessels to make a more interesting find
Why would he do that? Doesn't sound very professional. Did he have a history of academic fraud?

Id like to read where you read this, sounds like an interesting hypothesis.

archyfantasies.com/2012/06/22/the-10-most-not-so-puzzling-ancient-artifacts-the-baghdad-battery/

That page does a pretty good job of explaining the problems with thinking of them as batteries in a simple way. I have no idea why they were misidentified originally. It's possible that the guy just jumped to a conclusion because he thought it was a cool explanation. That kind of thing happens in archaeology all the time; people find something and hope that it's interesting, and then further analysis happens to either support or shut down the "wouldn't it be cool if...?" explanation someone proposed in the field.

Seneca explicitly addressed that Chinese silk is too expensive and immoral to wear

Cool thanks for the link.

What the fuck are you talking about? Eagles existed in America before humans did.

north america is famous for the bald eagle, osprey's are common among southern states, mexico's flag has an eagle on it based off of the aztecs symbolism, south america literally has the largest eagle in the world. Those are just examples I remember from the top of my head. Eagles have been in the americas for at the very least 40,000 years.

I wasn't joking

Indonesian sailors began trading cinnamon to Madagascar and the east coast of Africa in the first century AD. Pliny once wrote,

>“They bring [spices] over vast seas on rafts which have no rudders to steer them or oars to push...or sails or other aids to navigations...but instead only the spirit of man and human courage...These winds drive them on a straight course, and from golf to gulf. Now cinnamon is the chief object of their journey, and they say that these merchant sailors take almost five years before they return, and that many perish.”

beat me to it kek

>he doesn't go outside

new on this board, is this a meme?

Hittite, most of hittite/anatolian art is shit carved out of stone

No, it probably had to do with Hittites getting it from Babylon
(They fucking sacked it) some Anatolian shitty kingdom such as Mira getting it from Hittites, Lydia getting it from Mira, Greeks getting it from Lydians? Then Roman/Byzantines getting it from Greeks and finally Medieval kingdoms and later nations such as albania getting it from them

I like you.

So cool

They found tobacco too in ancient Egyptian tombs, too..

>Ayo so you be sayin we had vices n shieeet
Maybe they were black

no they didn't and he's wrong too. they were domesticated by and rode over on the backs of ice age equines then revolted later and killed all the horses off hence why there weren't any when euros came over but the eagles learned to fly even though they lost their language