this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
301 points (97.5% liked)
The Internet in Ancient Times
762 readers
6 users here now
Welcome to the stone age... or the bronze age... or the iron age... heck, anything with an 'age' is welcome, except our modern age or any ages to come.
This is about what the internet was like thousands of years ago back when it all started. Like when Darius the Great hired mercenaries via Craigslist or when Egypt invented emojis.
CODE OF LAWS
1 - Be civil. No name calling, no fighting, keep your flint hand axes inside your leather pouches at all times.
2 - Keep the AI stuff to a minimum. It gets annoying and old fashioned memes are more fun for everyone.
3 - None of this newfangled modern 21st century nonsense. We don't even know what "21st century" means.
4 - No porn/explicit content. The king is sensitive about these things.
5 - No lemmy.world TOS violations will be tolerated. So there.
6 - There is no ~~rule~~ law 6.
Laws of justice which Hammurabi, the wise king, established. A righteous law, and pious statute did he teach the land. Hammurabi, the protecting king am I. I have not withdrawn myself from the men, whom Bel gave to me, the rule over whom Marduk gave to me, I was not negligent, but I made them a peaceful abiding-place. I expounded all great difficulties, I made the light shine upon them. With the mighty weapons which Zamama and Ishtar entrusted to me, with the keen vision with which Ea endowed me, with the wisdom that Marduk gave me, I have uprooted the enemy above and below (in north and south), subdued the earth, brought prosperity to the land, guaranteed security to the inhabitants in their homes; a disturber was not permitted. The great gods have called me, I am the salvation-bearing shepherd, whose staff is straight, the good shadow that is spread over my city; on my breast I cherish the inhabitants of the land of Sumer and Akkad; in my shelter I have let them repose in peace; in my deep wisdom have I enclosed them. That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the widows and orphans, I have in Babylon the city where Anu and Bel raise high their head, in E-Sagil, the Temple, whose foundations stand firm as heaven and earth, in order to bespeak justice in the land, to settle all disputes, and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words, written upon my memorial stone, before the image of me, as king of righteousness.
founded 2 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not just that they didn't have a scientific method, it's that empiricism was a swear word. You were supposed to understand the universe through intellectual extrapolation of the Bible or of greek philosophy - not by dumbly testing out things in the real world until you found a consistent pattern. The scientific method is kind of the first instance of the Bitter Lesson.
Ironically, occultists had no such snobbery, that's why people like Paracelsus were able to be so influential even though their whole framework was basically fantasy. Just the fact that they would perform structured experiments and consign the results and use those results to establish theories put them head and shoulder above the rest.
That is fundamentally not true. Especially since it implies that science wasn't practiced outside of Christian institutions and Greek society. It completely omits things like the Islamic golden age, discoveries involving mathematics and astronomy in India, Chinese chemistry, and medicine throughout many parts of Africa
You're right, my comment only applies to the setting depicted in the comic. Seems to be late middle age Europe, with the Inquisition still going hard, not a good time and place to be an empiricist.