I find it very a very romantic notion to have unknown areas on the world. Like some desert in the far south, beyond which might lie anything.
this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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We have that today with outer space. For all intents and purposes it is the new ocean, and so far we've only put a few skiffs in it.
Yeah, but it's a lot harder to cross. Like, I could build a shitty boat from wood myself. A spaceship? Not so much. Especially not if it's actually supposed to leave this gravity well.
Crossing large spans of water was very dangerous, because of storms, getting lost, running out of food etc. Nowadays, crossing large spans of empty space is also very dangerous, but the dangers are a bit different. Regardless, I can see many similarities between crossing the Atlantic ocean in the 1400s and going to the moon 500 years laters.
Although you could travel the land. Perhaps not cross the Sahara but if you lived in the Roman world, you could quite easily take some years to walk off the edge of the map and just explore. There would of course be a good chance of death from illness, animal or person, but equally like today, you may also meet plenty of kind people who would let you stay and maybe even share their knowledge of the area and culture.
I like the idea that some people did. Just disappeared into the unknown on an adventure, found happiness and success there and never returned.
It was a lot later (1300s), but Ibn Battuta seems to have done just that. Guy leaves Morocco and just keeps going on and on, till he ends up in China. Though perhaps even more incredibly he actually does come all the way back. The historicity of his accounts is disputed and maybe only a part of it is true, but even if he only got as far as India, I still find it fascinating to imagine doing at that time.
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It'll eventually be more commonplace. Probably not build a raft level of simple, but eventually there will be common access.
I doubt we'll get that far before running out of resources (especially oil, which is necessary for pretty much everything even though not necessarily directly for space travel) and/or climate change ends mass-scale industrial society. Long term space travel is incredibly hard and it has a ton of effects on the human body, and solving those problems will be pretty low on our priority list when shit really hits the fan
I'm a little more optimistic about it. It's definitely insanely difficult to do, and I don't think a lot of people even get how hard it is and the crazy out of this world (literally) hazards there are with just flying to the moon and Mars.
But more than one country has sent things to the moon, and we seem to have low earth orbit cracked, so I can definitely see people normalizing moon transit and beyond in the inner solar system.
It gets even more hazardous past that though. But like the oceans before I really do believe humanities strive for exploration will endure and someday we'll go further and further.
Extra-solar system is a giant flashing question mark though. That might be the next new ocean, and might take us just as long if longer, if even ever, to conquer.
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Fittingly, the term romance originally meant “to derive from a romantic language”, meaning mostly Latin which was spoken in the Roman Empire.
The texts in reference were largely about chivalry and such. Hence the modern connotations.
So like, romance refers to a time before the world was fully known. :)
Wow, I never clicked that the Romantic languages meant 'Roman'! Thanks!
When I was a child I also thought the world (or more precisely, the earth) was infinite. Must have inferred this from movies and cartoons somehow. I was soooo disappointed to learn that the earth was finite.
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I'm not so sure this is accurate, the Romans certainly knew of China at least, to them it was called Serica, and they believed in a Manifest Destiny myth that they would one day conquer it.
Which would have been fukkin' wild if it did play out, I think by that point the capital would have moved to Samarkand or somewhere else in Central Asia just to be able to maintain regulation over the silk road.
And Tacitus described a people he called Fenni in northeastern Europe, and it's been conjectured that he could have meant one of the Finnic peoples around the continental side of the Baltic.
~~There was one legion that got lost in Persia and ended up working for the Chinese.~~
Edit: Maybe, maybe not.
Crassus' lost legion is just conjecture, there's no convincing evidence. It's a fun thought, though.
Is it? Oh, I didn't realise. I'll cross that out.
Yeah, it looks like the main evidence is that there's a mention of a similar formation to testudo being seen in western China a couple decades later, and maybe some Roman-style fortifications. According to Wikipedia a large number of prisoners were sent to Merv somewhat nearby, so it's all very suggestive, but definitely no smoking gun.
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In medieval Europe, spices from outside the world known to Europeans made it there through chains of traders and were luxury items. (IIRC, a spice from what is now Indonesia is recorded as having been a gift at a wedding in what is now Poland in the 13th century.) I’m guessing the definition of “known to” in this post is similar: Romans had access (at a price) to goods from these places, though nobody from the Roman world had actually been there, or even met anyone from there.
As far as the ancient European world goes, I think the furthest east they actually got were some sort-lived Greek-speaking states in the vicinity of India.
People would follow the silk road sometimes. Rome actually had limited diplomatic contact with China, even. That's not on the map, maybe because they didn't really understand where it was, besides somewhere far to the east. I'm surprised SE Asia is on it, I'll have to do some reading about that, but India was known even to the Greeks.
Quality of information would drop off really rapidly with distance, though, since it was easy to make up a fish tale about what you saw in far-off lands. So, you find a lot of crazy BS mixed in with helpful nuggets in things like Herodotus's Histories.
India was known even to the Greeks.
Alexander even tried to conquer India, but died before he got that far.
IIRC some of the scribes say he actually did, but didn't stay out of respect for their bravery. But, yeah, that's basically "she goes to another school", that never happened.
Plineys writings serve the same purpose. An example of knowledge brought to my by beer.
There were hellenic Indo-Greek and Indo-Bactrian states in the northwestern India and Pakistan for some two hundred years. I recommend reading the wikipedia article about greek influence on buddhism. Fascinating stuff.
They didn't like the cold, huh?
They really didn't. They referred to the northern reaches that they didn't visit, mostly Greenland as ultima thule.
The modern interpretations have included Orkney, Shetland, Northern Scotland, the island of Saaremaa (Ösel) in Estonia, and the Norwegian island of Smøla.
By the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period, the Greco-Roman Thule was often identified with the real Iceland or Greenland. Sometimes Ultima Thule was a Latin name for Greenland, when Thule was used for Iceland. By the late 19th century, however, Thule was frequently identified with Norway.[6][7]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule
But yeah they were aware of things beyond the limits of their maps. So idk id this is more accurately "roughly around the limits of roman maps" instead of "the area the Roman empire ruled".
Tacitus for instance talks about the Fenni and the romans definitely visited and knew the Baltic Sea, but there probably wasn't a whole lot going on around 100AD that would've been of that much interest to the romans. Fishing and relatively poor trading (by Roman standards).
Right, I forget that the concept of Thule changed over time.
And yeah, they were definitely aware of the world outside of their own cartography. I believe there were definitely accounts of them attempting to journey on the Baltic Sea, but I don't recall it ending well.
Similarly they also were well aware of the Chinese. It's disputed but Roman ambassadors or merchants made it to China at one point. I believe in 166 BCE a crew went over there, but unfortunately they likely returned home at a troubling time when the Antonine Plague was spreading.
Might be wrong about some details though.
Going from Italy to Russia or the Himalayans is like going from Florida to Alaska, except that the Mediterranean is even more beautiful.
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What’s the yellow line?
Silk road, I think
That’s what I was thinking, but I wasn’t sure
No sauna for the romans (only cold and hot baths, I guess)
Most Roman thermae featured a caldarium, which was like a hot steam sauna and the really fancy ones even had a laconicum which was kinda like a hot, dry sauna.
True, they never finnished their conquest to the north
I take issue with the wording. They already knew the earth was round and approximately 5000 stadia. Eratosthenes of Cyrene had proved it over a century before then.
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your telling me they reached Malaysia before Finland??
The post says "known to" rather than "visited", though it's not clear what that actually means.
But there's very little in the way of written evidence of the Suomi until way, way more recently than the Roman Empire. It makes sense that they wouldn't be particularly interested in an area that was sparsely populated, not technically sophisticated, and had little in the way of then-usable resources.
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