Pre-American industrial "evolution"

[Orius]

Actually I was referring to this civilization we are living in now. Go through the ancient Greek written record: bookkeeping was absolutely not the main purpose of the written record. It was hardly used for that at all. While the rare society like the Carolingians or the Incas sees the written record functioning primarily to record financial or material transactions, most tend to use the written record for more elevated purposes.

I was talking about Sumerian and other Mesopotamian cultures, whose writing systems are the ultimate source of Western alphabets, though.

 

[Umbran]

The short answer would probably be that they DID pick them up from the East-- meaning that the East was suffering from the same sort of thing at the same time...

Consider the Black Death--

Last I heard, the best theory on the Black Death was that it came from Ethiopia, not the Orient. In Ethiopia, the beastie that causes the plague was (and still is) endemic to the flea population - but the high temperature has an effect on the flea such that the flea doesn't pass the disease along.

The Black Death was preceeded by a global cooling trend (sometimes called the "little ice age"). This cooling allowed the flea to spread the disease, and it worked it's way up the trade routes of the East African coast to Venice and thus to Europe.

 

[Orius]

The Great Fleet of Zheng He sailed between 1405 and 1433, and were indeed cut short by a change in the Chinese government-- not only in a return to more traditional values ("everything worth doing had already been done by their ancestors") but in a reaction to the cost involved in building those immense junks. The author Gavin Menzies holds an interesting theory that they did, indeed, circumnavigate the world, discovering the Americas &c &c, but his book (1423: The year the Chinese Discovered America) is long on theory and short on actual proof, in my opinion (though it would make for an interesting Oriental Adventures/ European homebrew, which was mentioned elsewhere on these boards some time ago...)

A few months ago, there was a two-hour program on PBS which covered the book. They spent the first hour examining the known voyages, and the second hour examining the author's theory. In short, while I found his basic theory to be interesting, the more he tried to prove it, the more far fetched explainations he came up with to support it. I came off with the impression that if Ming China had been more ambitious, it would have been able to very effectively compete with Europe in the 16th century. And certainly it provided some campaign fodder for me.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

You go back far enough in history and you'll learn that writing was developed as a way to keep track of things. For inventory and other records. Highfalutin stuff like literature came later. In the case of Middle East it all started with pictures, progressed to ideograms, then some cultures took it to syllabaries and finally to an alphabet.

The impression writing was used primarily for art is just that, an impression. One gained through our tendency to focus on the interesting stuff. Agricultural data aren't interesting, soap operas are. So we tend to translate the interesting stuff and ignore the boring stuff.

Literally millions of baked clay tablets were found in the ruins of the Assyrian cities of Asshur and Nineveh. The vast majority were records. Annual reports and the like. The fiction section was a small part of the whole.

In the case of Greek writing what we have is what survived up to today. Which is most often what people were interested in preserving. Namely, the soap operas and other intellectually vital stuff. Agricultural records etc. got the short end of the stick, because people tended to see no value in them. Which is a shame, because comprehensive annual records of production can tell a lot about how a society is faring. If grain production drops off by ²/₃ after a period of great plenty, you know something's going on.

Much of our view of the past is shaped by what people considered important enough to save. And that, we are in the process of learning, can give us a very skewed view of our history.

Amen Brother! Let's get up with Greek accountants!

At the least it's pretty telling that they picked up the alphabet from the people they were doing the most trading with.

There's actually some pretty interesting stuff tracing what parts of the Greek literary genres come from which genres of more practical writing.

Though it should be said that writing gets used pretty fast for performance stuff as well as accounting.

To be fair, however, there aren't that many accounts of agricultural output that are terribly useful, mostly input and trasfers. People are willing to let peasants keep their own records, it's when it gets to the warehouse that things become important.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Last I heard, the best theory on the Black Death was that it came from Ethiopia, not the Orient. In Ethiopia, the beastie that causes the plague was (and still is) endemic to the flea population - but the high temperature has an effect on the flea such that the flea doesn't pass the disease along.

The Black Death was preceeded by a global cooling trend (sometimes called the "little ice age"). This cooling allowed the flea to spread the disease, and it worked it's way up the trade routes of the East African coast to Venice and thus to Europe.

I know the Mongols had laws on the books pre-major plague that seemed to be pretty clear reactions to the reality of the plague, but I don't know what chronology for Bubonic migration would be looking at.

The Epidemic certainly came from the East. There are actually pretty good records of what cities got hit and when. The crimea was the are I've heard cited as the earliest in the West.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Question: The fact that (it being my understanding) Chinese is a word-based alphabet, rather than a letter-based alphabet (like English) or a syllable-based alphabet (like Korean), would you consider this to have been a stumbling-stone in the development of the Chinese printing press as a practical application?

Just think about it: assuming you go for the moveable type in English, that means you have to cast 26 different symbols (assuming no capitalization), as well as punctuation, all in different quantities (e.g., the letter "e" will appear a LOT more than the letter "q").

But what about Chinese? Don't they have something like a few thousand symbols? Wouldn't that seriously slow down the use of cast symbols? Sure, you can fit more per page (since each symbol means an entire word), but wouldn't you lose production time when you found out you're missing a "horse" symbol and a "plow" symbol, for that text on agriculture? Stop production and go cast a few more symbols, only to have production halt again on the next page?

(Personally, I am more inclined to like syllable-based alphabets, so there's no pronunciation confusion... See the whole "how do you pronounce 'drow'" thread. )

It's a problem. You can either develop a really cheap and fast way to make the whole page as a-piece. In which case your materials won't be as good and you probably have to pay more people more. But You could do things like forms and reprints a lot easier and have cooler things more commonly.

Or you figure out a way to press the individual components of the symbol rather then the symbol itself. Which is cooler and more flexible, but also more technically complicated.

 

[mythusmage]

On Bubonic Plague

The most primitive strains are found in the Ethiopian Highlands. So that's considered the point of origin. Apparently through trade and travel the disease made its way to Manchuria, where it became established a very long time ago.

The murrain that hit Egypt in the Book of Exodus is said to be an early recording of a Bubonic Plague epidemic. The disease that struck Athens during the Peloponnesean War has been identified by some as Bubonic Plague.

It should be noted that Egypt has long had problems with rodents, going back to when they started cultivating grain. So rodent borne diseases would be a big problem at times.

 

[mythusmage]

On Records

If a district has a solid record of producing about 10,000 bushels a year, and then production drops one year to 5,000 bushels; it's a pretty good indication that something happened. Learning what exactly takes more investigation.

 

[Sir Elton]

Why didn't the native people of the Americas go through the armor-firearms-industrial revolution "evolutionary" steps that Europe and Asia did?

Quasqueton

Uhh .. .

They did. But they stayed in the Copper Age and never really advanced further. In fact, they slid backwards.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

If a district has a solid record of producing about 10,000 bushels a year, and then production drops one year to 5,000 bushels; it's a pretty good indication that something happened. Learning what exactly takes more investigation.

I think my point was that in early literate civilizations you're more likely to see what people are taken in rather than what's being produced:

Year One
This year those blasted peasants from that dismal valley brought in 10,000 bushels. Good for them.

Year Two
This year they brought in 5,000 bushels. The lord was displeased. There are now the heads of two 5,000 bushel late peasants over the gate.

Year Three
Oh My Sweet BAAL, Huns! Why didn't anyone tell us there were Huns over in dismal valley!?