> Roman Egypt preserves a much larger slice of our evidence than any other place in the ancient world. This comes down to climate (as do most things); Egypt is a climatically extreme place. On the one hand, most of the country is desert and here I mean hard desert, with absolutely minuscule amounts of precipitation. On the other hand, the Nile River creates a fertile, at points almost lush, band cutting through the country running to the coast. The change between these two environments is extremely stark [...]
> That in turn matters because while Egypt was hardly the only arid region Rome controlled, it was the only place you were likely to find very many large settlements and lots of people living in such close proximity to such extremely arid environments (other large North African settlements tend to be coastal). And that in turn matters for preservation.
yep, the worlds oldest shirt was found in an ancient rubbish pile in eygypt, nice shirt, but obviosly thrown out from ancient wear and tear.....it NEVER rains in eygypt...or to be exact any area can expect rain once in 400 years or something ludicrous, so ya stuff just sits, and in just the right conditions lasts for millenia, so we have ancient chit chat letters sent back and forth between women that represent the earliest first person dialogs in existance
edit, on reflection there are older summerian letters sent back and forth by traders in....cloth, who had a "shop" in one city/country but the main production was in mesoptsmia proper, and if memory serves the distant trader was a woman asking for more products to sell, and again other chit chat, but both instances required exceptional conditions and the use of very durable materials, papyrus paper and dried and protected clay
> it NEVER rains in eygypt...or to be exact any area can expect rain once in 400 years or something ludicrous,
The northern part of the country receives some rainfall in the winter. heavy winter rains occasionally cause flooding in Cairo, Ptolemaic Egypt was centered around Alexandria, which gets the most rain in the country - about 200 mm (7.87 in) annually. while that's still relatively low, it's not nearly as extreme as you make it seem.
ancient heart of eygypt, modern city of 250000
where the rain is a sort of academic thing that can be proven scientificly, but will never get the ground wet
Great context, but in reminding me of Bob Dylan’s Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, potentially many conversations from even those most auspicious regions went unpreserved.
> The other two are housed at the Whitworth art gallery in Manchester and a museum in Florence, Italy.
This sentence is somewhere in between funny and unprofessional.
The other hat in England gets an accurate location and a back link, the one in Italy gets a "in some museum in Florence". At least they put the city's name...
Reminds me of a Mitchell and Webb Look skit, where one of them has been working "for years" to ban tourists from Venice... along with the Italians. Keep Venice British!
I wonder how authentic the hat must be after restoration? And how exactly restoration is done ? It seems restoration had to be funded so must be some elaborate process.
Presuming they were careful to preserve the area of the hat surface, likely very authentic. If it doesn't have any creases, there's precious little you can do to reshape a given convex piece of felt. More oblate/more circular is really about it.
Now, felt can be reshaped easily with steam-level heat - but that would require a conscious effort.
I have been a Rams fan twice. I saw them defeat the Browns in a preseason game that benefited some charity (Fearsome Foursome era). It took place at the Coliseum. A blocked Browns punt sent the ball into the Browns end zone to settle the game in the final minutes. Then some scallawag moved the team to St Louis, and then better people moved it back to Los Angeles.
Aren’t all “teams” “of Theseus”? If the team remains in one city for say, 60 years, the people have changed over and over again. The stadium is probably different.
The academic ship is too abstract, I like the sport team concept. Name, ownership, coach, players, like you said stadium. I can't think of any immutable identity one of those teams has.
No, the Romans just generally did not wear hats, particularly the upper classes. Every Roman statue ever depicts a full head of hair, occasionally with veils, wigs or hairnets, but not hats. Apparently even Caesar's famous laurel wreath was meant primarily as a disguise for baldness.
Suspect. Laurel wreaths would make the world's worst toupee, as they are empty in the center, and provide the most coverage where balding men have the most hair.
One thing I've learned is that in all of the brief history of humans we're aware of, people a lot smarter than I am existed in fairly large numbers. It puts things into perspective. They would have learned to use hacker news and program computers as easily as I do. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
I love the perspective they had on things due to living in such different (yet remarkably similar) conditions.
I think we forget we're the "same" (more or less) homo sapiens as 200+ thousand years ago. Better overall conditions allow us to use the brain more (books, universities, etc) but our brain hasn't changed, as far as I know.
It's kind of exciting when you realize just how much there is to learn from the people who came before us. All of the most interesting, difficult problems of human minds and experiences are still almost just as pressing and difficult today, but many people had remarkable insights and made genuinely incredible progress in understanding things we tend to take for granted these days. Hard problems that we face literally every day, even.
Definitely true. In modern times we confuse understanding things with just being used to them.
I'm typing this on a smartphone. I don't conciously think of it as my "magic pane of glass" like the cliched Roman might but what's actually going on when I tap this screen is as much a mystery to me as it would be to them, at least beyond a few high-level concepts which it also wouldn't take all that much time to explain.
Every day we ride atop an unfathomable stack of abstractions and shouldn't take as much subconcious credit for this as we do. As a civilisation yes you might say we're smarter, but as individuals definitely not.
I don't think that's just a modern thing. The feeling that you understand your phone is the same as feeling you understand the hand holding it. The hand is as magical of a technology as the phone. We are deeply adapted to living with such magic.
I think if you transported the average Roman to modern times, after the initial future shock wears off, they would likely just become accustomed to technology much like any other person today who has no clue how most things work. They could learn to drive cars, use smartphones, catch flights, take medicine, etc.
They would probably even spend a lot of time talking about how things were better back in their days, and how pathetic society is now.
> Romans could have invented steam engines if they wanted to.
You invent such things when you have resolved many other problems first. Like water and sanitation, and geopolitical stability. And no, steam engines took a lot more time anyway because advanced metallurgy was necessary to get there.
There were times where one would be involved in many wars happening at their local level within their lifetime. We have had two big wars in the 20th century but many countries were not directly the theater of war and most frontiers did not change. There is much more stability now, you just get a lot of news that makes you seem that the world is chaos but the reality is the opposite.
> Romans could have invented steam engines if they wanted to.
They did not have the precursors to it, such as a lathe. Steam engine technology evolved out of cannon technology, which was developing for centuries before the steam engine. (The lathe also came about from cannon improvements.)
Most major inventions need a lot of available precursor technology, so it's actually kinda hard to think of things the Romans could have done if they only knew.
I keep thinking of a primitive printing press, but the Romans didn't have paper, either. Paper didn't appear in Europe before 1000 AD.
Actually it seems textile printing does have contemporary history. And maybe even older one. So jump from there to other materials might not be impossible.
Papyrus is also not a very good material for writing outside of arid areas compared to paper and especially parchment.
Unless kept in very good condition scrolls might last only a few decades. As far as we can tell many ancient texts were lost well before the Roman Empire declined because they weren’t popular enough for anyone to bother copying them.
I didn't know the Romans had the lathe. Thanks for the correction.
But they did not have a metal lathe, which is substantially more sophisticated. Invention of the metal lathe is credited to Henry Maudslay around 1800.
While steam engines with pistons existed before, the poor sealing because of inaccurate bores and pistons, made them not very efficient.
The great feature of the bucket hat IMO is that, unlike a wide brim hat, you can fold it down and stick it in your pocket when it gets cloudy or the sun goes down.
"What the ancient Romans wore may not be among the most pressing questions facing archaeologists, but it is one that attracts interest among the general public."
Us: “wOwWw”
The Roman: “that old thing?” I always find this juxtaposition funny. Like someone finding my old baseball cap in 2k years and fawning over it. Eat your heart out boys.
So it lasted about 2k years where it was, then was removed, put in storage and damaged by moths in the museum?
> Roman Egypt preserves a much larger slice of our evidence than any other place in the ancient world. This comes down to climate (as do most things); Egypt is a climatically extreme place. On the one hand, most of the country is desert and here I mean hard desert, with absolutely minuscule amounts of precipitation. On the other hand, the Nile River creates a fertile, at points almost lush, band cutting through the country running to the coast. The change between these two environments is extremely stark [...]
> That in turn matters because while Egypt was hardly the only arid region Rome controlled, it was the only place you were likely to find very many large settlements and lots of people living in such close proximity to such extremely arid environments (other large North African settlements tend to be coastal). And that in turn matters for preservation.
https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...
yep, the worlds oldest shirt was found in an ancient rubbish pile in eygypt, nice shirt, but obviosly thrown out from ancient wear and tear.....it NEVER rains in eygypt...or to be exact any area can expect rain once in 400 years or something ludicrous, so ya stuff just sits, and in just the right conditions lasts for millenia, so we have ancient chit chat letters sent back and forth between women that represent the earliest first person dialogs in existance
edit, on reflection there are older summerian letters sent back and forth by traders in....cloth, who had a "shop" in one city/country but the main production was in mesoptsmia proper, and if memory serves the distant trader was a woman asking for more products to sell, and again other chit chat, but both instances required exceptional conditions and the use of very durable materials, papyrus paper and dried and protected clay
We're never going to let Ea-nasir live this down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
He was complaining to "Lord Bezos," about receiving sub-standard material.
I'll just get my coat...
> it NEVER rains in eygypt...or to be exact any area can expect rain once in 400 years or something ludicrous,
The northern part of the country receives some rainfall in the winter. heavy winter rains occasionally cause flooding in Cairo, Ptolemaic Egypt was centered around Alexandria, which gets the most rain in the country - about 200 mm (7.87 in) annually. while that's still relatively low, it's not nearly as extreme as you make it seem.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Egypt#Rainfall
it is as extreme as I make it out to be in many places in eygypt, links from your link
city of 400000, where it does not rain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asyut#Climate
ancient heart of eygypt, modern city of 250000 where the rain is a sort of academic thing that can be proven scientificly, but will never get the ground wet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor#Climate
> but both instances required exceptional conditions and the use of very durable materials, papyrus paper and dried and protected clay
Note that papyrus is not a "very durable material"; it's an extremely fragile one.
Papyrus records survive in Egypt, and only in Egypt, because nothing ever spoils in Egypt no matter how fragile it might be.
Cuneiform records survive all over the cuneiform-using world because they are very durable if you set fire to them.
Great context, but in reminding me of Bob Dylan’s Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, potentially many conversations from even those most auspicious regions went unpreserved.
(talking about other hats)
> The other two are housed at the Whitworth art gallery in Manchester and a museum in Florence, Italy.
This sentence is somewhere in between funny and unprofessional. The other hat in England gets an accurate location and a back link, the one in Italy gets a "in some museum in Florence". At least they put the city's name...
Reminds me of a Mitchell and Webb Look skit, where one of them has been working "for years" to ban tourists from Venice... along with the Italians. Keep Venice British!
I wonder how authentic the hat must be after restoration? And how exactly restoration is done ? It seems restoration had to be funded so must be some elaborate process.
Presuming they were careful to preserve the area of the hat surface, likely very authentic. If it doesn't have any creases, there's precious little you can do to reshape a given convex piece of felt. More oblate/more circular is really about it.
Now, felt can be reshaped easily with steam-level heat - but that would require a conscious effort.
The hat of Theseus
I learned the formal name later in life but for many years pondered this in terms of sports teams. “I’m a Rams fan!” Are you really though?
I have been a Rams fan twice. I saw them defeat the Browns in a preseason game that benefited some charity (Fearsome Foursome era). It took place at the Coliseum. A blocked Browns punt sent the ball into the Browns end zone to settle the game in the final minutes. Then some scallawag moved the team to St Louis, and then better people moved it back to Los Angeles.
Aren’t all “teams” “of Theseus”? If the team remains in one city for say, 60 years, the people have changed over and over again. The stadium is probably different.
The academic ship is too abstract, I like the sport team concept. Name, ownership, coach, players, like you said stadium. I can't think of any immutable identity one of those teams has.
Pileus (plis) can be found amongst older Albanians (especially on the north) to this day.
> As it turns out, even the Romans understood the power of a good hat.
The author thinks Roman had low intellect or something?
I would think a bald man would soon connect the dots between sun exposure and sun burn.
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
No, the Romans just generally did not wear hats, particularly the upper classes. Every Roman statue ever depicts a full head of hair, occasionally with veils, wigs or hairnets, but not hats. Apparently even Caesar's famous laurel wreath was meant primarily as a disguise for baldness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_hairstyles
Suspect. Laurel wreaths would make the world's worst toupee, as they are empty in the center, and provide the most coverage where balding men have the most hair.
Probably hats were associated with people who work in the sun like farmers or soldiers.. Togas were also impractical clothing compared to a tunic.
Every roman statue depicts politicians and leaders who lived in the city. Peasants, farmers did not get statues.
Most people think ancient people were idiots. Romans could have invented steam engines if they wanted to.
One thing I've learned is that in all of the brief history of humans we're aware of, people a lot smarter than I am existed in fairly large numbers. It puts things into perspective. They would have learned to use hacker news and program computers as easily as I do. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
I love the perspective they had on things due to living in such different (yet remarkably similar) conditions.
100% agreed with you.
I think we forget we're the "same" (more or less) homo sapiens as 200+ thousand years ago. Better overall conditions allow us to use the brain more (books, universities, etc) but our brain hasn't changed, as far as I know.
Right, and as far as I know as well.
It's kind of exciting when you realize just how much there is to learn from the people who came before us. All of the most interesting, difficult problems of human minds and experiences are still almost just as pressing and difficult today, but many people had remarkable insights and made genuinely incredible progress in understanding things we tend to take for granted these days. Hard problems that we face literally every day, even.
Definitely true. In modern times we confuse understanding things with just being used to them.
I'm typing this on a smartphone. I don't conciously think of it as my "magic pane of glass" like the cliched Roman might but what's actually going on when I tap this screen is as much a mystery to me as it would be to them, at least beyond a few high-level concepts which it also wouldn't take all that much time to explain.
Every day we ride atop an unfathomable stack of abstractions and shouldn't take as much subconcious credit for this as we do. As a civilisation yes you might say we're smarter, but as individuals definitely not.
I don't think that's just a modern thing. The feeling that you understand your phone is the same as feeling you understand the hand holding it. The hand is as magical of a technology as the phone. We are deeply adapted to living with such magic.
Agreed. Indeed I'd guess the average Roman felt similarly about civilisations that came before them!
I think if you transported the average Roman to modern times, after the initial future shock wears off, they would likely just become accustomed to technology much like any other person today who has no clue how most things work. They could learn to drive cars, use smartphones, catch flights, take medicine, etc.
They would probably even spend a lot of time talking about how things were better back in their days, and how pathetic society is now.
> Romans could have invented steam engines if they wanted to.
You invent such things when you have resolved many other problems first. Like water and sanitation, and geopolitical stability. And no, steam engines took a lot more time anyway because advanced metallurgy was necessary to get there.
If geopolitical stability was a precursor to technology, we would still be living in the stone age :)
There were times where one would be involved in many wars happening at their local level within their lifetime. We have had two big wars in the 20th century but many countries were not directly the theater of war and most frontiers did not change. There is much more stability now, you just get a lot of news that makes you seem that the world is chaos but the reality is the opposite.
Right - you could almost argue that the opposite is generally true.
> Romans could have invented steam engines if they wanted to.
They did not have the precursors to it, such as a lathe. Steam engine technology evolved out of cannon technology, which was developing for centuries before the steam engine. (The lathe also came about from cannon improvements.)
You also needed cheap fuel and relatively expensive labour to make it feasible.
Early engines were used to pump water out of coal mines because they were very inefficient and transportation was very expensive.
Of course Romans actually had coal mines in Britain and the Rhineland so it wouldn’t have been entirely fat fetched.
Most major inventions need a lot of available precursor technology, so it's actually kinda hard to think of things the Romans could have done if they only knew.
I keep thinking of a primitive printing press, but the Romans didn't have paper, either. Paper didn't appear in Europe before 1000 AD.
Actually it seems textile printing does have contemporary history. And maybe even older one. So jump from there to other materials might not be impossible.
They had papyrus, though.
Not really. They imported it, and never figured out how to make it. The papyrus plant would only grow in Egypt.
Papyrus was also inferior to paper in that it tended to come apart when wet, or would just come apart.
Papyrus grows fine in sicily (I have a lot in the garden, besides some water it doesn't really need any special care). Besides egypt was roman so…
Papyrus is also not a very good material for writing outside of arid areas compared to paper and especially parchment.
Unless kept in very good condition scrolls might last only a few decades. As far as we can tell many ancient texts were lost well before the Roman Empire declined because they weren’t popular enough for anyone to bother copying them.
The only reason the Romans could not have invented the steam engine was that the Greeks already did before them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
They had a Lathe too.
I didn't know the Romans had the lathe. Thanks for the correction.
But they did not have a metal lathe, which is substantially more sophisticated. Invention of the metal lathe is credited to Henry Maudslay around 1800.
While steam engines with pistons existed before, the poor sealing because of inaccurate bores and pistons, made them not very efficient.
Incredible. I found this video that shows how the Aelopile works: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/trUtLLu_Ono
What an awesome invention!!!
It was a one off that never progressed beyond a toy, then or since.
It looks like a bucket hat.
Bucket hats are pretty useful as far as hats go. Glad to see they have a long standing heritage!
The great feature of the bucket hat IMO is that, unlike a wide brim hat, you can fold it down and stick it in your pocket when it gets cloudy or the sun goes down.
There’s a joke about Oasis in there somewhere.
Uncool to alter the title
Just waiting for some tech bros to add ai and re-invent the bucket hat with a new private equity funded company.
Google Hat, the coming successor to Google Glass.
“Designed by AI”
You can pay with bitcoin and the ai design a unique hat for you and then you get a complementary nft and you can chat to llm about it
"What the ancient Romans wore may not be among the most pressing questions facing archaeologists, but it is one that attracts interest among the general public."
Such a snobby comment!
Us: “wOwWw” The Roman: “that old thing?” I always find this juxtaposition funny. Like someone finding my old baseball cap in 2k years and fawning over it. Eat your heart out boys.