There's little anything in ancient Sumer, barring clay, reeds, and foodstuff. But in a way, that qualifies them for the role of master-engineers pretty well. A culture that had to figure out how to make pyramids, palaces, seagoing ships and great hydraulic engineering works from that resource base already has part of the 'let's see what this stuff can be made to do' mindset.
Sumerian claypunk, innovation much earlier.
- Thread starter ArKhan
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There's little anything in ancient Sumer, barring clay, reeds, and foodstuff. But in a way, that qualifies them for the role of master-engineers pretty well. A culture that had to figure out how to make pyramids, palaces, seagoing ships and great hydraulic engineering works from that resource base already has part of the 'let's see what this stuff can be made to do' mindset.
Thank you carl, all it takes is steam to get them going. They hand dug pits for oil until around 1594.
Wrong kind of toughness. Ceramics can be extremely hard, but they are also very brittle. It is also almost impossible to shape them with the degree of precision needed for things like gears and pistons, and at the time of Sumer, I think all ceramics were earthenware, hence friable as well as fragile.
I think chasing the steam engine is a lost hope here. You're better off working with other advances.
Alcuin
Banned
How about an earthnware vessel for producing steam that made glass pistons work levers that set off bronze wheels and gears?
Glass was hideously expensive at the time and also hard to shape precisely. Try glassblowing a piston sometime, see how far you get.
WAY too early for that kind of precision glasswork. Glassblowing doesn't come about until the first millennium BC, and probably not before Hellenistic times. And aside from the problem of making glass containers with the strength and precision required and getting the seals to work on the setup, the idea of this combination suggests reverse-engineering to me. I can't see how anyone without a preconceived notion of how a steam engine should work would try this.
It sounds hideously inefficient. If you are going to build a steam engine, I think bronze is your only viable option at this point. But with Sumerian experience in hydraulic engineering, I think waterwheels are much more likely anyway.
I have read that before, but I always assumed that it was because iron working was introduced from outside. Is there evidence that Africans developed iron working independently?
Alcuin
Banned
According to the UN's Iron Roads project, there's evidence that Iron Smelting was invented separately in Africa twice. The first time (for which there is less evidence), in Uganda, about the same time as the Hittites first used iron in Asia Minor, the tribe that invented it used iron solely for cooking and the technique never spread.
The second time, for which there's plenty evidence, people in Nigeria began using iron at about the same time as the technique was spreading to Morocco from the original Hittite source. (So they developed it themselves a couple of hundred years before they would get it from the Hittites.)
NapoleonXIV
Banned
Didn't everybody have slaves back then?
Tho you are right in one sense, there's no evidence I know of they were abundant, or cheap
NapoleonXIV
Banned
OK, so somebody decides to make bronze gearing for the waterwheels, then someone else notices how well these vessels hold steam. "Just the thing," thinks young Hammurabi,".... for that weird fire bellows nobody could ever get to work. Maybe that'll be my fortune, I'm bored with law anyway" .
Well, what would the Sumerians do with a steam engine if they made it in the first place?
That doesn't matter! What matters is that Ur will be full of half clay, half pig intestine steam engines, which will raise the humidity of the city by a lot while creating an unimaginable demand for pig intestine.
Sounds like a fun place. Lets go.
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
Not in Sumeria. And the rest is not possible without it. To build a useful boiler you would need better metallurgical skills than could be developed that fast. Also, you have to build all the valves and gauges, without which boilers are pretty dangerous.
You would need the advanced mathematics, engineering schools, maintenance facilities, etc to maintain steam equipment, requiring a significant infrastructure, which would have to be built and maintained.
Meanwhile everyone would starve to death because all the manpower was spent building steam engines that have absolutely no use whatsoever. I suppose they could be useful to build a railroad to the mountains to get iron, but there a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing going on there.
Ah yes well, once we have bronze some wayward traveler might find iron and then they could build railroads to get this new, stronger metal. Maybe we can get a smarter king to enforce a literacy policy?
Actually, the concept of chattel slavery seems to be a relatively recent (as in post-Neolithic) idea. I don't know the evidence, but there seems to be general agreement the Sumerians had a concept of personal dependence and subjection, but this could have been very different from what we associate with 'slavery'.