Puzzles of History
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, November 23, 1999
Abstract
We are probably not aware of the amazing knowledge lost through the Christian devotion to ignorance that created the Dark Ages. Archaeological and some documentary evidence keeps popping up that the ancients had within their grasp many important discoveries—indeed had made the discoveries but had failed to develop them, presumably because ancient economies were not up to the level needed for wisespread usage. Thus some of these discoveries remained expensive novelties for the amusement and decoration of kings and queens. Creationists and Atlanteans usually mention them, but orthodox scientists feed loony myth-making by ignoring them. Anyone know anything?
Ancient Batteries
An article appeared in Discovery magazine in 1939 that has been quoted in every creationist book and psudo-scientific history book since von Daniken. The report was that a German archaeologist, Dr William König, working for the State Museum of Baghdad in Iraq, was browsing through the bric-à-brac in the museum basement when he found an old box containing some clay pots. The box was labelled "ritual objects"—artefacts found at excavations at a village south east of Baghdad called Kujut Rabua.
König examined the pots noting that they were uniformly 15 cm high and contained a sheet of copper about 12 cm high and curled into a cylinder about 4 cm across. The edges of the copper sheet were permanently joined to form the cylinder by solder which turned out to be a 60/40 lead/tin alloy. The bottoms of the pots had a disc of copper sealed with bitumen and bitumen also sealed the top of the pots holding in place in the centre of the copper cylinder a rod of iron. Pitting on the rods showed that they had been treated with an acid solution, though the pots naturally were quite dry in their box in the repository.
König had enough schoolboy physics to realise at once that the cylinders were electric cells—batteries!—from a time over a millennium before Volta!
What acid had the manufacturers of these ancient batteries used? After the War, Willy Ley and Willard Gray of the GE High Voltage Laboratory at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, built models of these ancient cells and found that they indeed did work well as acid cells when such simply available acids as lemon juice, vinegar or copper sulphate solution were used as an electrolyte. The cells produced 1.5 to 2 volts, as would be expected.
Cells like these were not produced again until the eighteenth century but these dated from the Seleucid, Parthian and Sassanid periods—about the time of Christ.
Similar pots were found at Tel Omar also near Baghdad and thin rods of iron and copper were found that might have served as electricity conductors, allowing several batteries to be linked in series to give a bigger spark. Other batteries were found at Ctesiphon by professor E Kuhnel of the Staatliches Museum in Berlin, but were disassembled as though they were just being made.
Conceivably these batteries were used to light oil lamps made from locally available oil, allowing a large room to be illuminated almost instantly. Did the Magi use them for lighting the flames of the fire temples in a mysterious and magical way? Were they used in the spectacles of the mystery religions, like those at Eleusis to permit the instantaneous illumination that allegedly the hierophants managed to achieve, and were they therefore considered the work of the devil by the Christians? If batteries were known, one has to ask why they were not better known, and why they disappeared from view for almost 2000 years.
It is also claimed that electo-plated objects have been found in Babylonia and in Egypt dating to even earlier times than these. It does not seem too incredible that the ancients discovered batteries but that they learned how to electroplate gets into the relams of the fantastic and that they also designed light bulbs and Crookes’ tubes, as some of the Atlanteans and Creationists claim, does seem fantastic.
I first read about these in Pauwels and Bergier’s The Dawn of Magic (also published as The Morning of the Magicians) in 1964 when a student. Can anyone throw any more recent light on this?
Jechiele
Eliphas Levi (Louis Constant) in his book on the history of magic tells of a rabbi in the time of Louis IX who demonstarted before the king for all to see a dazzling lamp with no oil or wick that lit itself. This rabbi called Jechiele produced a crackling bluish spark when he touched a nail driven into the wall of his room. Anyone that subsequently touched his iron door knocker received a severe shock.
Ancient Metallurgy
J Alden Mason claims that ornaments from Peru reported to be of an age before the Incas were made of platinum, a metal that has to be heated to almost 1800 Celsius to be melted. Recently a team of practical archaeologists had the utmost difficulty in obtaining a piece of copper as big as your thumb using kilns and bellows equal to those of the ancients. Copper melts at about 1000 Celsius. Is platinum, like gold, found in the Andes in its free state?
If so, the answer is plain but a more difficult problem is described in Horizons magazine of October 1958. A Chinese girdle with filigree ornamentation was found in the grave of Chou Chou, a Chinese general of the Chin dynasty of about 300 AD. Spectroscopic analysis showed the fastener was 85 percent aluminium, the other metals being 10 percent copper and 5 percent manganese.
In modern times aluminium was not discovered until 1803 and has to be extracted from bauxite using high temperatures and electrolysis of the molten salt mix.
Is the report of the analysis of the buckle correct and if so, how did the Chinese do it?
The Ashoka Pillar, in the courtyard of the Kutb Minar in Delhi, is 7 metres high (24 ft), has a diameter of 40 cm and weighs 6 tons. Although not on its original site, having been moved by the Moguls, it nevertheless has an inscription to Chandragupta II which dates it at about 400 AD. The puzzle is that thogh made of apparently ordinary cast iron, the pillar barely rusts!
Antikytheros Clock
In the Scientific American magazine of June 1969, a Cambridge (UK) archaeologist, Dr Derek J De Solla Price, described an "ancient Greek computer." It had been found in 1900 by sponge divers working off the island of Antikytheros in Greece. They found the wreck of a Greek vessel dated from artefacts on and around it to about 50 BC.
One of the pieces found was badly corroded but obviously had been bronze. Not until 1958 when Price was able to use modern methods for cleaning the item was it found to be a mechanical device in the form of a box with 20 gear wheels, a crank, spindles and pointer on three dials. The device was a clock and also served to calculate the phases of the moon and the location of the planets. This device is an astonishing anachronism. Is it a joke? Or has it been misdated because it was wrongly identified with the Greek wreck when it was really seventeenth century?
