I miss the Bronze age -- those were fun times! :-)

I'm interested in whether the collapse of the Eastern Meditteranean (and wider?) bronze age had echos or similar patterns back in Asia? The collapse was around 1200 BCE

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The youtube channel "Machine thinking" has excellent videos on the development of these techs.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=machine+thinking

Thanks for posting this article, it’s really interesting and the blog seems great.

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These are fun. Here's another: Tyrannosaurus lived closer to the period of the moon landings than to the period Stegosaurus lived.

This is just an off-the-cusp thing but my understanding is that some research has found a correlation between the complexity of moral/religious systems and the size/complexity/density of society. It makes more sense since keeping track of people individually gets harder / there's more anonymity / you have problems you wouldn't have had in a sparser setting. I'm not sure I'd say more moral in this case, though.

There are also some writers like Steven Pinker who actually uses violent crime, etc. statistics to argue that the world has gotten more moral / good over time. (I find this somewhat tenuous in that it might just be that we're better at making people not want to do bad things, rather than them actually being morally superior).

I agree - it's just such a story so deeply ingrained in the 2,000 years of the dominance of the Confucian ideology, so I just released it as I remember it. Most East Asian people (in Sinosphere) would recognize the idiom

I smoked like a little bit of weed and then was reading this answer and soon realized that it blew my mind. Super interesting stuff, especially when you talk about the lathe. Never even considered how transformative it was.

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Because there was no Roman steam engine?

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Did they have the population for it?

Were they really there? I thought they made it to the point of being equivalent to the 15th century but never got any further technologically.

But they never found the Americas, so they didn't really have an Age of Empires

Slavery. The Romans integrated slavery in a way very alien to the modern understanding of the term. With slaves integrated into the social fabric of the Roman civilization and being a valuable commodity to boot , the pressure to invent technological labor saving advancements wasn’t there.

Using slaves to accomplish a task would always be more cost effective than using a machine , especially when the number of slaves one owned was a social signal to boot. Much like driving a Mercedes signals success in some cultures today , having a lot of educated and capable slaves equaled similar sentiments back then.

>Archaeologists in Israel say 44 pure gold coins dating to the 7th Century have been found hidden in a wall at a nature reserve

That it's been in a wall for well over 1000 years, makes me hopeful that there is still plenty of history out there to be found.

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Because of all that lead in their plumbing has dumbed them down over the generations.

Something as obscure as piece interchangeability is crucial to any industrial society. The possibility of replacing a damaged piece of a machine with other (almost) equal was something humanity didn't grasp until a few centuries ago.

I'd heard that there was a find of something that could reasonably have been the lake of wine. Trying to google on it, I end up getting directed to Wikipedia, but I guess it boils down to an artificial pond/lake that doesn't seem to have been used for drinking water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Terrace_Pavilion

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Cat swinging was big before metal detectors were invented. Not so much nowadays but in poorer areas with excess cats it's still practiced.

Nope. Kublai Khan chose 元, meaning something like "beginning". The currency is called 圆, which means "circle", or "round". Yuan wasn't always the name of the currency, but was more of a unit.

Here's a Quora thread with some better explanations:

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-Chinese-currency-called-Yuan-Is-it-because-of-the-Mongol-Yuan-Dynasty