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davywavyI tend to have noticable phases in my reading; I went through one period of reading my way through classic books, another of the norse myths, andother of Japanese literature, and so on. over the last year or so the definite pattern in my reading has been of the Romans and their histories. People like Cassius Dio, Suetonius, Livy and others.
Anyway, I was reading Cassius Dio's Reign of Augustus a few months back and one of the abiding impressions I came away with was just how much time he spent firefighting; that is, zooming around the empire putting down petty rebellions of minor tribes when presumably what he'd've rather been doing is having a fine old time whooping it up in Rome with some saucy Illyrian dancing girls. The thing which stuck in my mind and nagged at me about this was the question: Why did these petty little tribes bother? To the modern mind, it's a good question. You look at the map of the Roman Empire at the start of the book, note that it encompasses pretty much the entire Mediterranean and European world, and then wonder why a few hundred people who own a couple of hills in Iberia thought they had the faintest chance. Given the sheer weight of resources that the Romans could bring to bear and the fact they had the reputation of not taking kindly to people rebelling you'd think that people would know which side their bread was buttered, but no. Every year, tribes with names nobody even remembers now would look down from their palisade on top of a hill and say "You know what? I reckon those Romans are puffs", and Augustus would have to break off from watching the Illyrian fandango and go and sort it out.
The reasons for this made no sense to me until I visited Maiden Castle in Dorset. It's the largest Iron-Age hill fort in Europe, and an impressive bit of engineering it is too. I stood on the ramparts and looked out at the horizon and it dawned on me that if you'd been king of that particular castle, then you'd've literally been lord of all you surveyed. You'd've completely dominated the region, controlled trade, and you would, quite simply, have never encountered anything to match your power. You might have heard traders tales of some Empire over the sea to the south, but really you wouldn't have though much of them right up until the day Vespasian Caesar showed up and slaughtered every man-jack of your people. It was a reminder against the folly on my part of assuming contemporary knowledge and attitudes on the part of people who lived in the past, because it's an easy trap to fall into.
It's also easy to drift off into a bit of a reverie about how if one were to suddenly fall into a spacetime wormhole and wake up in the past you could use your impressive future-knowledge to conquer the world. Whilst it might be nice to imagine I could introduce the steam engine and the tommy gun to the Roman Empire and make all kinds of improvements, what would be significantly more likely is that I'd end up being fed to lions for general entertainment purposes. To be honest, waking up in the past pretty much anytime before the invention of antibiotics would be likely to suck quite a lot. I suppose the best hope I would have in the 'suddenly transported into the past' stakes would be to hope it was somewhere in Europe and to try and get into a monastery as fast as possible, possibly by showing off my command of letters and numbers.
So anyway, after that preamble, question for the day: You wake up in the past. Where/when would you hope to wake up, and what knowledge to you seriously think you might to be able to impart to the locals without being burned as an heretic/fed to lions/other messy demise?
Anyway, I was reading Cassius Dio's Reign of Augustus a few months back and one of the abiding impressions I came away with was just how much time he spent firefighting; that is, zooming around the empire putting down petty rebellions of minor tribes when presumably what he'd've rather been doing is having a fine old time whooping it up in Rome with some saucy Illyrian dancing girls. The thing which stuck in my mind and nagged at me about this was the question: Why did these petty little tribes bother? To the modern mind, it's a good question. You look at the map of the Roman Empire at the start of the book, note that it encompasses pretty much the entire Mediterranean and European world, and then wonder why a few hundred people who own a couple of hills in Iberia thought they had the faintest chance. Given the sheer weight of resources that the Romans could bring to bear and the fact they had the reputation of not taking kindly to people rebelling you'd think that people would know which side their bread was buttered, but no. Every year, tribes with names nobody even remembers now would look down from their palisade on top of a hill and say "You know what? I reckon those Romans are puffs", and Augustus would have to break off from watching the Illyrian fandango and go and sort it out.
The reasons for this made no sense to me until I visited Maiden Castle in Dorset. It's the largest Iron-Age hill fort in Europe, and an impressive bit of engineering it is too. I stood on the ramparts and looked out at the horizon and it dawned on me that if you'd been king of that particular castle, then you'd've literally been lord of all you surveyed. You'd've completely dominated the region, controlled trade, and you would, quite simply, have never encountered anything to match your power. You might have heard traders tales of some Empire over the sea to the south, but really you wouldn't have though much of them right up until the day Vespasian Caesar showed up and slaughtered every man-jack of your people. It was a reminder against the folly on my part of assuming contemporary knowledge and attitudes on the part of people who lived in the past, because it's an easy trap to fall into.
It's also easy to drift off into a bit of a reverie about how if one were to suddenly fall into a spacetime wormhole and wake up in the past you could use your impressive future-knowledge to conquer the world. Whilst it might be nice to imagine I could introduce the steam engine and the tommy gun to the Roman Empire and make all kinds of improvements, what would be significantly more likely is that I'd end up being fed to lions for general entertainment purposes. To be honest, waking up in the past pretty much anytime before the invention of antibiotics would be likely to suck quite a lot. I suppose the best hope I would have in the 'suddenly transported into the past' stakes would be to hope it was somewhere in Europe and to try and get into a monastery as fast as possible, possibly by showing off my command of letters and numbers.
So anyway, after that preamble, question for the day: You wake up in the past. Where/when would you hope to wake up, and what knowledge to you seriously think you might to be able to impart to the locals without being burned as an heretic/fed to lions/other messy demise?
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 09:33 am (UTC)Anyway, that rant aside, I shall give some thought to your actual question ;-)
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Date: 2010-10-25 09:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 09:39 am (UTC)I think I need a lie down. Before the Apocalypse comes, you know?
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Date: 2010-10-25 09:42 am (UTC)That said, apparently the Romans knew the principle behind the steam engine anyway, they just didn't see the point as slaves were a lot cheaper. A bit like China now.
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Date: 2010-10-25 10:12 am (UTC)Failing that... language is going to be a major sticking point for me since my language skills are diabolical, which rather limits me to the last few hundred years of the English Empire and related colonies.
I'd like to think I could be a grand inventor in the Victorian age of steam, but popping into existence then from nowhere wouldn't be much for me to go on, you needed position and status to get anywhere and I'm not that sure that pointing out the usefulness of data grouping into objects and singletons is particularly transposable...
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 10:29 am (UTC)Similarly, introducing realistic painting to Japan pre-1500 could make me a very wealthy man. It could also get me beheaded for suggesting deformity in the subject.
I think I'd have a better chance of travelling hundreds of years into the future and getting a cushy job in the British Museum as a living exhibit. I suspect our Chinese overlords would give me all the soylent green I wanted.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 11:02 am (UTC)I think I have a good rule of thumb for finding out what technologies are and aren't worth having at any given point in history: if it was considered magic at the time, it was probably worth knowing. There were a sweet few centuries in Europe where having command of the Arabic numerals was pretty much wizardry.
There are also a few areas where contemporary knowledge we all take for granted simply didn't exist in the past. Someone who's passed GCSE Biology and taken a first aid course almost certainly knows more useful information about human anatomy than anyone born before the 18th century. That's got value in any time period.
Pretty much every theory I have ever come across with any bearing on the subject suggests that my skills have the most value in the present, and that my best option is to develop the ones which will be more valuable in the future. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure time travel is impossible, so I don't really have to worry about learning to ice fish or blacksmith.
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Date: 2010-10-25 11:15 am (UTC)There's a few bits of technology I can see helping if they'd come in a little bit earlier: I'm not sure which I'd pick.
The stirrup. Suggested as the reason why "Arthur" managed such total dominance with cavalry.
The horse-collar. I'm not sure how this works, but apparently before this was invented, you couldn't use a horse for ploughing without it choking itself. Major agricultural revolution.
A couple of revolutions in spinning: the Great Wheel as a step up from the drop-spindle, and the spinning wheel as a step up from that.
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Date: 2010-10-25 11:47 am (UTC)There are various points in history I'd love to see "live" as it were but only as an observer and ideally invisible (and wearing a hazmat suit because just walking down the street in a medieval city is likely to really challenge my modern immune system).
It would also be interesting to see if a piece of technology, let's say a digital camera, would work in the time before it was invented.
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Date: 2010-10-25 01:26 pm (UTC)Very, very few people alive today are immune to smallpox. Ancient colds are going to be new to us.
Regarding magical technology, there does seem to be a time and a place for everything. For example, we've had the knowledge for railways and steam engines, and we've been burning coal for a long time, but industrial-era railways didn't happen until suddenly all the factors were in place - people drinking tea, the invention of mechanised spinning, supplies of cotton and alpaca from overseas, shenanigans with the wool trade... All of those factors had their own dependencies too.
If you think about it, there are available technologies now which would lead to social changes, but we're not ready for those changes, so the technologies are ignored. Science gives us knowledge, but if people prefer homoeopathy over vaccinations, what can you do?
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Date: 2010-10-25 01:39 pm (UTC)This is why instead of flying cars we have mobile phones with a processor many times more powerful than, for example, the computer on board Apollo 11.
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Date: 2010-10-25 06:44 pm (UTC)Question is what is going to get me the bijou Palazzo on a quiet canal? I can lay my hands on a gorgeous set of Victorian Encyclopediae with hundreds of plates even I can understand showing precisely how to: make a steam engine work/construct a Martini-Henry breech loading carbine/dissect a human body/triple your grain harvest using the Holkham system/cultivate the silkworm/defeat the Turks at Lepanto [oh you have already done that your Dogeship? ok how about...]/ensure an Ironclad battleship will float.
Those epidemics your Serenity? Let me tell you about Doctor John Snow & the Reverend Henry Whitehead...but you can carry on gving the dodgy water to any effete English visitors. Oh, and a tip for your sucessors, don't trust any Corsicans.
Cosmopolitan place Venice, bound to be some English lying about the place to translate (while I mug up on Latin for Dummies).
Agree with the post about antibiotics, can one bulk buy off prescription?
D
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Date: 2010-10-26 08:35 am (UTC)H
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Date: 2010-10-25 07:25 pm (UTC)Lindisfarne 792?
Personally, I'd be stuffed if I went anywhere too far back, though 1986 San Francisco, just as Bones McCoy is having his rant about 'dialysis! What is this, the dark ages?', and handing out the "grow a kidney" pills would be good.
What do you mean it's not real.....?
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Date: 2010-10-26 11:33 am (UTC)Nasty, brutal, scary...
Why? Two reasons... one, I know enough I reckon that I could JUST ABOUT handle myself without standing out too bad... and two? You are within a 35 minute boat ride of Mortlake and that means you can offer you 'weird ideas' to John Dee... use HIM as a contact and way in, and gain patronage and power that way.
What would I give 'em? SIMPLE technological breakthrough... Heat milk until JUST before it is about to boil... (if it curdles you doing it wrong)... and ta-da I just pasturised milk for the first time- its win win!
Try and experiment on some poor folk with the whole cow-pox/small pox routine (cos I SO do not want to live in a world with small pox ya know)... maybe cultivate penicillin (take bad food, get Dee or someone to get one of those weird 'occhiolino' the Ducth have... dammit no working Microscopes until 1590... dammit... re-plan)
OK, so I arrive back in about 1562... use the pasturisation discovery and succesfully predicting the fate of betrayal of the Hugenots in the Harflur campaign, plus use any power/money I have made to sponsor sea-journeys by Hawkins and above all Drake... use THAT money plus my own rep afor predictions to predict/through dosh at the Amarda... hmmmn around now I wonder if I should try out the theory that if I tie a string around the pancreatic duct of a dog, it will produce insulin which I can remove and inject and discover diabeties and the insulin cure at the same time (not that i am hot on the symptoms, but what the hell eh?)....
So invented pesturisation and insulin... should have a bit of money etc. Right NOW its the 1580's and I know for a fact I have to side with the Dudleys and fast- stay as low profile as possible, Dee has fucked off, so I could get his tag and read books and petend to talk to ArchAngels etc. meanwhile- late Elizabethan London= much whores and much theatre... (Will Shakespear time)... I would TRY and get one of the monopolies Liz I was handing out in the end of her raign and would shamelssly abuse it until JUST BEFORE the speech where she goes 'Sorry' and gives the monopolies back to parliament... by then, if I was still alive, I'd get the first microscopes and go after penicillin... and yeah... stufff like that...