How possible is it for photography to be invented during the New Kingdom
- Thread starter Tjakari
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Egyptians could have discovered the principles of camera obscura, trough experimentations in optics, altough I'm not sure they could have the technical capacities to do so during the New Kingdom era : it was hard enough to produce it that it didn't get relatively widespread before the XVIth century.
Giving the nature of Egyptian art, tough, I'd suspect that camera obscura would be mostly used for more pragmatical uses, and not for painting or similarly minded uses.
As for pinhole photography : you need a photosensible paper which would require some really, really advanced chemistry (assuming silver nitrate could make papyrii photosensible, which I litteraly don't know about). At this point, I'm not sure it's even doable.
Giving the nature of Egyptian art, tough, I'd suspect that camera obscura would be mostly used for more pragmatical uses, and not for painting or similarly minded uses.
As for pinhole photography : you need a photosensible paper which would require some really, really advanced chemistry (assuming silver nitrate could make papyrii photosensible, which I litteraly don't know about). At this point, I'm not sure it's even doable.
Maybe Heron of Alexandria or Archimedes could ad something to this developement.
Well, it wouldn't be New Kingdom, then.
More seriously, I doubt it. People are mislead by some pseudo-historians into thinking of Hellenic science as some kind of Scientific Revolution comparable to what we knew in the XVIIIth/XIXth century.
While it represented a scientific breaktrough period, it was lead by theoricians, who didn't saw much use into engineering except as gadgeting to proove their points or to really specific scientific uses (such as observations instruments as Anticythere machine).
You'd need such peoples to get their hands dirty, while ancient Egypt have a fair deal of chemistry advances, it was essentially tied to "worker" tasks (such as cosmetics or painting) that none self-respecting Hellenic scholar would even think dwelling with), to create specific scientific tools out of nowhere AND to be particularily in advance from the possibilities of their era (being understood that camera obscura would be already an achievement in).
Giving than their eigneneering works were generally state-commanded and not exactly "Mannathan Project"-like("Archimedes, stop talking about planets and their orbits, and just supervise the building of my palace!")
Your biggest problem is not the camera (a pin hole camera can be made to work), nor photoreactive chemicals (e.g. silver compounds). Although neither of those is trivial.
It's fixing the image so the picture doesn't get wiped out due to more light hitting it.
I don't see that happening.
It's fixing the image so the picture doesn't get wiped out due to more light hitting it.
I don't see that happening.
Your biggest problem is getting the Egyptians to innovate like that in first place. In three thousand years of Pharaonic civilization, innovation was something that the Egyptians simply didn't do.
Well, of course they did. The Pharaonic civilization was very different in 600 BC that in what it was in 3000 BC. Some important new techniques were imported (iron for example) but certainly not all.
ComradeHuxley
Donor
The best chance would probably be to utilize Bitumen of Judea.
I am not sure about the exact details of the actual photographic process but the map of the New Egyptian Kingdom at least checks out.
ComradeHuxley
Donor
Looks like it could be plausible. Bitumen was used by Egyptians for embalming and much earlier by Sumerians for ship building and general construction. Surely somebody will notice that bitumen more exposed to the sun hardens earlier/better.
This leaves the discovery of a camera obscura. According to Wikipedia the earliest extant written record of the camera obscura is to be found in the writings of Mozi (470 to 390 BC), a Chinese philosopher and the founder of Mohism. Mozi correctly asserted that the image in a camera obscura is flipped upside down because light travels in straight lines from its source. His disciples developed this into a minor theory of optics. The philosopher Aristotle (384 to 322 BC) was familiar with the principle of the camera obscura.
So having some Egyptian scholar discover the concept of the camera obsucra shouldn't be out of reach as well. The only thing that needs to happen now is someone having an „eureka“ moment of combining a bitumen plate with a camera obscura device. Not exactly the most likely occurrence but nothing that would require some type of deus ex machina by a timeline writer either.
On a somewhat realted note here is a link to an artist creating modern day petrographic photos.
This leaves the discovery of a camera obscura. According to Wikipedia the earliest extant written record of the camera obscura is to be found in the writings of Mozi (470 to 390 BC), a Chinese philosopher and the founder of Mohism. Mozi correctly asserted that the image in a camera obscura is flipped upside down because light travels in straight lines from its source. His disciples developed this into a minor theory of optics. The philosopher Aristotle (384 to 322 BC) was familiar with the principle of the camera obscura.
So having some Egyptian scholar discover the concept of the camera obsucra shouldn't be out of reach as well. The only thing that needs to happen now is someone having an „eureka“ moment of combining a bitumen plate with a camera obscura device. Not exactly the most likely occurrence but nothing that would require some type of deus ex machina by a timeline writer either.
On a somewhat realted note here is a link to an artist creating modern day petrographic photos.
Interesting. But... the time of exposure and resolutions (if we could even use that term) involved are pretty enormous. It may exist as a curiosity, (anyway, Mozi is some over half a millennium from the last gasps of the new Kingdom, and lived in the entirely wrong part of the world) but there would be an utter lack of tech (let alone scientific) base to improve it further toward something resembling actual photography.
By the way, it would sem that idea of light propagating in straight lines was not alien to New Kingdom Egyptians, judging by the way they represented the Aten in the Amarna Period. They had some good, although seemingly entirely empirical, understanding of geometry. So it is not impossible that they could come out with some crude version of camera obscura. The point is, what use could they ever have for something like the proto-photography resulting from bitumen in the box?
Critically, they won't have anything like lenses, nor, I believe, sufficiently developed glassmaking to make even very crude ones (in the New Kingdom age at least). Let alone the (far more advanced than camera obscura) understanding of optics needed to even think about lenses. Heck, basic glassmaking (with colored glass) was cutting-edge brand new technology at the time. Consider that Galileo apparently had trouble with his time's glassmaking ability to produce decent lenses (and also with related optics)... and that was after almost three millennia of (very unequal) development with glass, and centuries-long progess in theoretical optics.
Still fascinating.