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.
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.
There are viking inscriptions and stuff at the hagia sophia, that’s a hell of an adventure for the time!
there is an infinite difference between “you can technically do it but you’re 99% likely to die” and “you literally cannot even reach the edge of the atmosphere without a vehicle engineered and built by 5000 people”
You’re right that there are many big differences. Launching a rocket into space could be compared with building a major cathedral back in the day. People did both, but not very often, because those projects are very demanding. Ships were also super expensive, but we built those all the time, so obviously the requirements weren’t quite as high.
Also attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the recent centuries, so losing a few sailors isn’t quite the same as losing an astronaut. Nowadays, safety is taken a lot more seriously which makes the project even more expensive.
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.
We could put people on Alpha Centauri in 88 years with 50s technology like Project Orion. The really hard part is figuring out a way to make us use the technology we do have for things like that, instead of for bombing each other back to the stone age.
I get what you’re going for, but no we couldn’t. The radiation and other interstellar particles and dangers would kill a crew using moon landing technology.
Regarding the problem of running out of oil, I look at it a bit like, “we are a plant (biological plant)”.
The plant starts in a seed, which provides it with nutrients (energy) as some kind of starting bonus. It can use these nutrients to develop itself and live, but it will recognize that at some point it will run out of calories and die. So it has to do something about it. What it does, is to develop leaves. These leaves collect the sunlight and this way, the plant has a constant and continuous source of energy/calories. So it can keep on living.
Society has a very similar problem. We have oil, but it is limited. We can use it to develop, but eventually we’re gonna run out of it. So we have to do something about it. Just like a plant, we develop solar panels to collect the sunlight, so we have a continuous income of energy. This way we can live waaay beyond the time of our starting bonus.
You can’t replace petrochemicals with sunlight, let alone convert everything that runs on some form of oil product into eg. electric - not nearly enough rare earths in existence, and hydrogen is not the solution either for the majority for a variety of reasons (starting from ridiculously low energy density to being absolute ass to store)
A large part of oil can be replaced with electricity. Please point to examples where neither solar power or renewable biomass are sufficient.
Oh no you can’t. Building a ship that can cross the ocean (without you drowning first of course) is actually quite difficult. Not only does it have to be extremely durable, you also have to have a lot of knowledge to navigate. And then there’s the economic problems, like who pays for it, how do you get enough food, etc…
Yet, people made the journey to Australia over 50000 years ago, long before they had developed agriculture, wheels or domesticated animals. There was no navigation or fancy ships. And they did in the hundreds. Enough genetic diversity to settle down for the next 50000 years.
We are very far from doing that in space and beyond our solar system it may even be completely impossible. But who knows what happens in the next 50000 years.
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.
Maybe you should look into flat earth.
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.
They also never annexed Ireland.
Yup. Not because they couldn’t, but because they figured they had enough boggy northern European territory, and would rather spend resources on Africa, Persia or the Middle East, which had nice things they wanted.
Thoughts like that make me wish I could travel through time, just watching history and see how different it would be if this or that happened.
Heck, just go back 20k years and you’ll see gobs of history we know nothing about.
I would kill for an alternative history TV show, where the Roman Empire and one of the Chinese dynasties control approximately half of Eurasia each. I have no talent for writing, so I dunno what the setup would be.
I kinda like the idea of it opening on a train heist. (If you set the tech at industrial revolution)
Make it a english / Chinese language collab show. Would be heckin’ neat.
The harsh realities of Central Asian trench warfare as the Romans continue expanding in bursts and booms with developments in transportation and communication tech allowing greater and greater consolidation of what they have. Even the once mighty Persians are now only another saga told by Latin poets inhabiting a collection of provinces as Roman as Gaul or Germania Magna like the Carthaginians of old.
The wars narrow down to Samarkand as the two great empires tear apart the wide open landscapes of the Steppe to decide who will consume who.
The various Indian kingdoms have thrown in mostly with China knowing the tide is coming for them next, but Rome has made allies in Nusantara and Tamil country through the trade potential to all of them in cracking the jade egg.
China’s already played their surprise card deploying their latest in gunpowder warfare technology, but the Romans have adapted in the most Roman way they possibly could, refining the digging process to allow soldiers to form a moving trench line that can crawl up against an enemy while allowing the soldiers to always be easily within cover. Roman propoganda now toutes the shovel as the symbol of Roman discipline and rank coordination.
With this stalemate an espionage operation is launched, two monks dispatched by the Emperor’s secret order board a train bound for Nanqing. The Emperor has learned that the Middle Empire is transporting plans for the latest industrial marvel they’ve pulled out their asses to counter Rome’s uncountable numbers. The monks are charged to seize the plans if possible, and make sure they never reach Nanqing if not.
Appropriately alt hist while also being a call out to a real heist that actually happened in real history, that being when Justinian ordered two monks to sneak into China, steal live silk worms, and make it back to Rome so that Rome could destroy China’s monopoly on the stuff, and IIRC they pulled it off.
YAAAAAAS. Thanks for this. Exactly the kind of thing I imagined. It would be so dope.
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.
There are some pretty shots of Miami.
What’s the yellow line?
Silk road, I think
That’s what I was thinking, but I wasn’t sure
It matches the one depicted on the Wikipedia map quite well.
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.
They knew the Earth was round, yes, and I admit they could’ve used wording with a little less ambiguity. I think the best way to look at this is that the map shows what the Romans KNEW was there
AHEM you’ve included Scotland in that, bawbag
It says the known world. Presumably they knew about Scotland.
Aye they didn’t get any further than Perth though! So the vast majority was unknown to them
To be honest they’re welcome to most of the central belt if they’re still interested
The border is the world that was known to Rome. It’s not meant to be a representation of the borders of the Roman empire.
Dunno if East Kilbride actually counts as part of the world tbh
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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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A sunken Roman Galleon was found in the Caribbean.
Gonna need a source for that one.
I can’t find anything. The only articles I’m finding are about a Spanish Galleon that had $17bil in gold/silver that sunk off the coast of Colombia. I also find that claim incredibly suspicious as a Roman Galleon wouldn’t be able to cross deep water oceans. Mediteranian sea, sure. Suez canal and Red Sea, if the thing had been built, but I’m pretty sure they just carried ships across land to the Red Sea/ Gulf of Suez
There was a book I read in my school’s library when I was 8 or so on the Bermuda triangle that claimed (or at least implied?) that a roman ship was sunk there.
Though the book was for children and presumably completely unreliable, I have seen it written before, so maybe that’s where they saw it too?
I’m not the one making the claim, but found something that this tall tale might be based on: https://www.grunge.com/756660/the-mysterious-bay-of-jars-explained/
Tldr: Brazilian entrepreneur throws some amphorae into a bay to grow barnacles on them for aesthetic reasons. Disreputable sea treasure hunter finds some of those, makes a flurry of wild claims, gets banned from Brazil for theft of actual antiquities from another wreck and he goes silent when people start asking more questions.
So the closest I came when looking for a source, was 20th century amphorae in a Brazilian bay, nothing about a roman shipwreck in the Carribean. But since the claim was a roman “galleon”, a claim for it to be in the Carribean also means little.
Source on that one? That’d be almost a millennium before Norsemen arrived in Greenland, which was a pretty huge journey at that time. Getting to the Caribbean—without coming across via Greenland & Canada, for which there would surely be evidence, would be a much larger step than anything else going on at the time.
Finding a shipwreck doesn’t necessarily mean the boat was sailed there, it might have been abandoned and drifted with the currents.
That’s how Japanese ships ended up in America as well.
Doesn’t make the Caribbean known to the Romans.
How about an attempt at sailing an Egyptian papyrus boat to the americas
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/heyerdahl-sails-papyrus-boat
