Sumerian claypunk, innovation much earlier.
- Thread starter ArKhan
- Start date
The only really possible one is gunpowder, and even then they wouldn't have all that much use for it.
I could believe iron working. Iron is rather plentiful, and not that hard to smelt. It's just a matter of figuring out how.
Printing is not that big of a deal once you have paper (although movable type *is* a big deal). But paper itself is non-trivial. I would not easily believe in Sumerian paper, unless you have Sumer surviving a few thousand extra years. Ditto the steam engine. You need fairly advanced metallurgy first.
Printing is not that big of a deal once you have paper (although movable type *is* a big deal). But paper itself is non-trivial. I would not easily believe in Sumerian paper, unless you have Sumer surviving a few thousand extra years. Ditto the steam engine. You need fairly advanced metallurgy first.
For steampunk you need a supply of fuel. There is no coal and you would quickly run out of trees for making charcoal from.
Corrrect.The Minoans invented printing; the Phaistos Disk was produced using stamps. However, there was not enough literate people in their society for them to exploit the idea. That is the problem of the Sumerians exploiting high technology - too few people to get things really going. A large city in their era has a population measured only in thousands!
maybe they use oil for the steam engines? they are in modern Iraq after all.
And how would they get the oil out of the ground?
I don't think oil was known as a power source until rather recently.
Leo Caesius
Banned
By that logic, then the Sumerians had already invented printing, because the earliest Sumerian "texts" (a kind of crude pictographic system used prior to the invention of writing) were marked with tokens, stamped into the clay to give a tally of whatever it was that was being transacted. The Indus Valley Script also looks to have been stamped.
Leo Caesius
Banned
At that point it leaked to the surface in a multitude of places. The Sumerians used crude oil and petroleum byproducts for a variety of purposes: in lamps, for waterproofing, as an adhesive, and apparently even as a medicine.
I rather think the Sumerians were busy enough with inventing stuff as things were, but paper is not really all that far-fetched. There is a whole lot of water and reeds and not a lot of other resources in Mesopotamia. If someone observed at some point that mashed dried reed dries into a kind of sheet, this could be developed as a substitute for more labour-intensive textiles.
Unfortunately, it won't have much of a future as a writing material for a while. Clay's cheaper
Unfortunately, it won't have much of a future as a writing material for a while. Clay's cheaper
For quite a while it will. I mean, they used the stuff as mortar! Then the resource will be overharvested and they'll have to start looking for more.
Sounds like a good spur to innovation to me. The problem is to make them need enough oil.
Well, getting oil out of the ground isn't too hard. A lot of the time it would seep out of the ground, in 1264 Marco Polo visited Baku in Persia, he reported oil seeping out of the ground in great abundance and it being collected for fire. If they know it makes fire, they'll use it for that. All it takes is some steam to rustle a plant or something and scientists start playing around. It wouldn't be too long after that that some sort of primitive external combustion engine was created.
Oh, yes it would. First you have to have the surplus population that allows playing around, which requires civil engineering and agricultural technology far ahead of what they already had. Then, at the very minimum, you need a few extra centuries, if not millennia, of metallurgical knowledge to fashion even a useless aolipile, let alone pistons and seals suitable for a useful external combustion engine of any type (Watt steam pressure engine, Newcomen atmospheric, Sterling, etc.). And that's ignoring the social setting which encourages experimentation and would recognize the value of mechanization, which probably means a tradition of building and using other sorts of machines (like watermills, for example).
NapoleonXIV
Banned
Yes, but follow your reasoning far enough and it's impossible for things to get started when they did. It's a chicken-egg problem, does the steam engine need the alloys, or are the alloys developed for the steam engine? Isn't an increased population a result of new farming methods, not their cause?
It's really difficult to see how widespread slavery doesn't generally discourage innovation though, why try to save labor when it's so cheap?
Strangely, then, we might get a situation in which less people is the key, not more. If all the slaves suddenly die for one reason or another the survivors might start looking for ways to do more with less.
Ah.... no. My reasoning is that you have to go through the intermediate stages to bootstrap yourself from neolithic tech to steam tech- you can't make the jump all at once, and the intermediate stages take a lot of time. You *can* go from neolithic to bronze tech (*maybe* even straight to iron tech, though I don't think anybody actually did), and from bronze to brass/iron, with parallele development in agriculture and mechanics to get you from man power to animal power to water/wind power, and at the end of a long series of incremental steps in a bunch of parallel tracks, it all comes together to get you to the point where you can make the step up to steam power and extensive mechanization.
The steam engine needs the alloys. The alloys are developed for cannon barrels, or pipe organs, or plumbing, or...
Yes. That, and better civil engineering. Which is exactly what I said. The Sumerians probably could pull off a lot of advanced civil engineering, given a genius or two. You don't need anything beyond neolithic materials and man power to put your buildings in the right place and build canals and drains.
It does. It takes fairly advanced economics to make slavery generically unprofitable. And the beginnings of mechanization introduced from elsewhere certainly don't hurt.
Fewer people is never the key, unless you're already near carrying capacity*. Fewer slaves, yes, but not fewer people; too few people, and nobody has time to experiment because they're busy staying alive. Kill off all the slaves, and you're setting things up for an economic collapse. Replace slaves with free (as in liberty, not cost) labor, and you get accelerated technical advancement.
*For an example of a society near carrying capacity, see Europe just prior to the Black Death. After it burned itself out, the survivors were actually much better off than before, because there were fewer people able to exploit the same amount of resources, meaning that just about everybody had a surplus. Which is the perfect environment for radical social and technical alterations; the technical advances in that era aren't particularly obvious, but the social ones are.
Max Sinister
Banned
@Foxfire: I think sub-Saharan Africa never used bronze, but they managed the jump to iron working.
Instead of paper, they can also use pergament.
Instead of paper, they can also use pergament.
Unfortunately, that would be an inefficient solution. The great thing about paper is that it can be sold dirt cheap, encourages mechanisation because its production process scales almost indefinitely, and can be made from garbage. Parchment competes for its resources with the leather (skins) and building (lime) industries, so its products will not alleviate a resource scarcity, just present an allocation decision.
In the Assyrian and Persian Empires, Aramaic scribes used what is believed to be a form of parchment or leather. It never displaced clay in Mesopotamia or papyrus in Egypt, presumably for that reason.