What did the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum look like, buried under the lava of Vesuvius?
Herculaneum is one of the three cities that fell victim to the eruption of Vesuvius…

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Egypt is not one: Where and why the ancients built the pyramids
Everyone knows about the famous pyramids of Egypt. Thanks to their huge size and amazingly…

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What people looked like a century ago: Modern technology has allowed scientists to get to the bottom of the truth
What did people from the past look like? Most often, the guideline for answering this…

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Coffins, torpedoes, grave safes and other strange things, with which in the XIX century, struggled with the abduction of corpses
The beginning of the 1800s in Britain and America was marked by a rapid surge…

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drainage system

How did the first coins appear, what was before them, and who printed the first bills

Money – quite an ancient means for calculations. But market relations arose much earlier. For centuries, the ancient people made purchases, exchanged goods without the use of coins, banknotes and promissory notes. How did you manage to conduct trading operations, and what led to the emergence of modern money – in our material.
What people calculated in ancient times
Market relations emerged as early as 7-8 millennia BC. After the decomposition of the primitive communal society, not only living conditions improved, but also instruments of labor. Due to this, people began to appear surplus manufactured products, which were exchanged for more needed.
Different nations had their own subjects, acting in the role of money. Continue reading

Plumbing, civil rights and technology: What the world lost when the Greeks conquered Troy, and the arias – the Dravidians

The legends of dark times in Europe and Asia are full of enthusiasm for the lost civilizations, developed so high that the listeners of these legends could hardly believe. Much later, with scientific progress, Europeans began to relate to these traditions with increasing skepticism: it is clear that the world is developing from simple technologies to complex ones, where can complex technologies come from simple ones? With the development of archeology, mankind again had to believe in lost civilizations. At least, in comparison with the narrators of the legends, they were very realistic. No Atlantis and aliens – the creations of the human mind and hands.
During the end of the Bronze Age, something happened that could be called the Apocalypse – at least for several developed cultures at once. Natural disasters and economic crises began to shake them, and the final blow struck the raids of much less developed nations. For a long four centuries, barbarism reigned in the lands where before that people used baths, studied science, composed poems and traded with cities on the other side of the seas. Continue reading