6 Breakthroughs made by the Ancient Greeks
Some of these are completely insane. It baffles me how people who didn’t have the scientific instruments and information we have gathered since the Enlightenment were able to figure this stuff out. How the guy who pretty accurately calculated the earth’s circumference 2,060 years ago by using shadows and a weird measurement system called “stadia” is mind boggling. He was almost right. Ancient people are not given enough credit. Note; that site is advert ridden. They really want that ad revenue. Like really. It may be crammed with annoying ads, but the articles are often very much worth reading, especially if you like to learn odd historical facts. Just a warning haha
People also have this weird idea that the ancients didn’t know about each other and didn’t interact, which is silly. I’m talking about Europeans, Asians, Arabs etc. They think these people didn’t communicate. They traded, learned from one another, and of course, fought 😬 Trinkets from far, far away have been found in Viking burial sites. There’s many more examples of things like that. History is cool. I’ve forgotten more than I’ve learned, if that’s possible 😅 I feel like I want to relearn a lot of things, but I worry that I don’t have the brain power to do so. Maybe once I find out what’s wrong with me, I can do something about it and possibly regain my memory. Like I wrote before, I’m trying to get off the meds that destroyed my brain. Then, maybe I can learn again since the damage seems not to be permanent in most cases. Okay, not going to get into that now. No more negativity today. 🫠
I’ve always been really interested in the Bronze Age, maybe I should do some recreational reading, but nothing too dry and academic. I’m not looking for a lecture lol. Give it some levity. 👌
The only dry, academic thing I’ve ever liked is Early Music, both sacred and secular. I wouldn’t really call it totally dry, but the reenactors take it pretty seriously, with as accurate as possible period costume and exclusively accurate period instruments. Truly beautiful music. Do recommend. In NC, we have Carolina Pro Musica and sometimes I wish I could be involved somehow but I have none of the necessary skills to be of use. I always wanted a Hurdy Gurdy since I discovered this type of music, but they go for about $1500 because the nice ones are handmade by someone who specialises in period instruments or even just Hurdy Gurdies alone. They make the most beautiful droning sound, like something you would imagine hearing in a candlelit medieval tavern. Some people say it reminds them of certain medieval set video game soundtracks. Here is my favourite Hurdy gurdy composition on YouTube by far
It’s an original composition by Andrey Vinogradov. Guy’s a genius. The comments are freakin gold!
Holy crap WordPress just glitched out on me and almost made me lose my post! I am seriously considering switching to greymatter since someone updated it for modern times and put it on GitHub. lol “modern times”, did I really just say that? Am I that old? 😭 Anyhoo Greymatter is the first script I used for a self-hosted blog in 2003, so it was obviously extremely outdated and had tons of safety concerns and wouldn’t have worked on any php version still available. It was extremely popular at that time, and most people used it for blogs hosted on personal domains. I’m excited to check out what kind of updates were made or if any features were added. I haven’t gotten around to that yet. WordPress is so bloated and glitches sometimes, but the one just now was probably the worst. I do wonder how updated Greymatter handles media, because the original had nothing of the sort. New Greymatter has the ability to import WordPress posts. When I was using it, there were no “themes”, you had to make the layout yourself, basically it was just code snippets/inserts. Very simple. It was very similar to how we used to make custom Livejournal layouts, of which I made many for both myself and friends.
Ah, I have rambled and gone on a stream of consciousness again. At least it’s positive and about things I enjoy ☺️