In the modern world, we like to think we are pretty smart. We have the internet, amazing medical knowledge, space flight and self-driving cars to prove it. However, if we were stranded on a desert island tomorrow, most of us would have no clue how to start a fire or catch a fish, let alone rebuild all that extraordinary technology we rely on.
We’re not necessarily any cleverer than our ancestors – we just have an accumulation of centuries of technological progress on which we can rely. Many of the ancients were much more advanced than we realize. There are recent inventions that had actually been discovered centuries earlier and then forgotten. A huge proportion of our modern devices and machines rely on ancient inventions such as paper, levers and gears, and many everyday items are far older than we realize. The Aztecs had chewing gum. There was brain surgery in the Stone Age. And the Chinese have had silk clothes, sulphur matches, toilet paper and whiskey for thousands of years.
That’s not to mention those pieces of ancient technology which we no longer understand, or which surpass our present-day knowledge. We don’t know how to make Damascus steel, which was once the hardest metal in the world. We don’t know how the Mayans made their weatherproof pigments. And we don’t know the secret of Greek fire, a much-feared mysterious Byzantine chemical weapon that burned in water.
This book collects the stories of hundreds of ancient devices, inventions and breakthroughs from around the world and across the centuries. From the first telescope to the invention of the crossbow, and from Etruscan false teeth to early Chinese mechanical clocks, this is a fascinating glimpse into past eras that were far more technologically complex and advanced than we sometimes realize.