The Vikings navigated the sea with the help of a sun stone, the Parthians knew electricity, and the ancient Greeks created the first steam engine. Archaeological finds of recent times confirm that people who lived thousands of years ago possessed technologies comparable to modern ones.
Jug battery
In 1938, during excavations in Khujut Rabu, east of present-day Baghdad, Austrian archaeologist Wilhelm Koenig found a clay jug the size of a man's fist. The neck of the vessel was filled with bitumen, and inside was a rolled sheet of copper and an iron rod. The characteristic traces of corrosion on the metal suggested that the jug had once contained acid - vinegar or wine.
Koenig immediately assumed that in front of him was a galvanic cell, in other words, an electric battery almost three thousand years old. However, then no one took it seriously.
Half a century later, students of the Smith College from the USA, under the guidance of professor of mathematics and history of science Marjorie Seneschal, made an exact copy of the Baghdad "battery", filled the vessel with vinegar, and it gave a voltage of 1.1 volts.
To date, twelve jugs similar to the Baghdad artifact have been discovered. What they were used for is unclear. Koenig believed that the Parthians used a battery to apply a thin layer of gilding to ceramics, jewelry, and figurines. The German archaeologist Gerhard Eggert refuted this assumption, pointing out that the peoples living in the territory of modern Iraq were not familiar with zinc, which is required for galvanic gilding.
Canadian historian Paul Keizer put forward the version that the Baghdad design is not a battery, but an ancient device for pain relief procedures. According to the British researcher Paul Craddock, the artifact was used in cult rituals, placed inside the statues of the gods: touching them, the believers received a slight electric shock.
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Components of the Baghdad Battery.
Steam engine two thousand years old
The first working steam engines were presented to the general public in the 17th century by the Italian Giovanni Branca and the Spaniard Jeronimo de Beaumont. In 1698, British military engineer Thomas Severi filed a patent for a steam engine. If you believe the descriptions and drawings given in the treatise of Heron of Alexandria "Pneumatic", two thousand years ago the ancient Greeks created mechanisms set in motion by the force of steam.
The so-called eolipil, designed by Heron himself, was a sphere that rotated on its axis thanks to steam ejected under pressure from two nozzles. Directed in different directions, they created a torque, due to which the eolipil made up to 1500 rpm at a fairly low pressure. This is exactly the speed that modern designs develop, built according to the drawings of the ancient Greek inventor.
Ancient greek computer
The ancient Greeks also had a kind of computer - a complex mechanical device of three dozen bronze gears, several dials and hands, with its help the Greeks calculated the movement of celestial bodies and could accurately predict the dates of astronomical events.
This mysterious device is constantly mentioned in ancient literature, but it was discovered only at the beginning of the twentieth century on a Roman ship that sank near the Greek island of Antikythera. Hence the common name - the Antikythera mechanism.
From the sunken ship, archaeologists lifted only separate parts of the antique device, and it was completely reconstructed in 1959 by the English historian of science Derek de Solla Price.
At the beginning of the 2000s, researchers involved in the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, an international project, found that with the help of this device it is possible to predict solar and lunar eclipses very accurately. Interestingly, the device takes into account the ellipticity of the Moon's orbit using a sinusoidal correction.
Fragment of the Antikythera mechanism raised in 1900 from a sunken Roman ship.
Viking magic stone
Medieval Scandinavian sagas tell about the sun stone, with which the Vikings navigated the sea. For a long time, information from literary monuments was not taken seriously, and the navigational skills of the ancient Scandinavians remained a mystery, until in 1967 the Danish archaeologist Torkild Ramscoe suggested that the magic stone was a crystal of Icelandic spar.
This transparent mineral is able to separate normal and polarized light. If you point a laser pointer at it, the beam will split - one will pass through the stone, as through ordinary glass, and the second, polarized, will deflect from the first beam by a stroke distance. Physicists call this birefringence, and it was with it that the Vikings determined the location of the sun, even in cloudy weather. After all, if you know where the sun is, you can set the cardinal points (the sun at noon is above the south point).
Finally, the dispute about the Viking sun stone was closed by an archaeological find: on a sunken ship of the era of the British Queen Elizabeth I, a crystal of Icelandic spar was found next to a compass. In 2011, a group of scientists led by Guy Ropard from the University of Rennes (France) proved that British sailors used it for navigation, since the guns on the ship influenced the position of the compass needle, and the navigators did not know how to compensate for this deviation at that time.
A crystal of Icelandic spar, which the Vikings used to determine the location of the sun during their voyages.
Alfiya Enikeeva