Purple dye extracted from sea snails made the Phoenicians rich traders (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Purple dye extracted from sea snails made the Phoenicians rich traders (2020)

middleeasteye.net

61 pointsBallu31 comments

You know when people ask hypotheticals like "if you were transported to medieval times, had to live there, and can take one thing with you" and you realize how useless computers, phones, or light bulbs would be? I think my new answer is a bottle of exotically colored dye!

You would make good money by just peddling the bottle themselves for majority of history. Glassware, fine China and other vessels that can contain your dyes are not cheap before the industrial revolution.

No, not that much, they knew how to make glass since way long ago. I guess in the Americas you could, they apparently either had not much glass or it wasn't viable (like the wheel, which was for children's toys mostly).

I've always wondered how things would have played out in the americas if someone had invented something like the Chinese wheelbarrow[1] which is meant to work something like a human powered cart.

[1]https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbar...

I've always imagined a solar-powered scientific calculator.

And my usual thought is to bring bag full of ibuprofen and peddle that as a pricy hangover cure for the nobility. Truth be told, I doubt I would get anyone to even try my pills.

I'd bring my Casio Rangeman. Altimeter, barometer, compass, thermometer and time in a small solar powered package. I'd be able to predict weather and the setting and rise of the sun with greater accuracy than anyone else. Hopefully I could get a job in a kings court as a wizard. Worst case I sell it for a mansion.

https://www.gshock.com/watches/master-of-g/gw9400-1b

Actually if you do that, you’ll be able to start your own religion and have the king follow you.

Man, depending on the era, I think each of these items is enough to start a religion.

You’d probably be killed for that kind of sorcery.

Not related to the article, but thanks for connecting some dots for me. My first smartphone was a Casio G'zOne and people still don't believe me sometimes when I say I had a Casio phone. It was basically the only rugged smartphone on the market at the time - gorilla glass, rubberized edges, waterproof. Knowing it was part of the legacy of these rugged electronics helps fill in the gaps of why Casio was making phones and why they were basically bulletproof. I've been buying "rugged" phones ever since trying to fill that hole in my pocket.

And in a couple of years they will become electronic waste and you will be burn for witchcraft.

Showing up prior to the Reconquista in Europe with a working knowledge of 0 and the Hindu–Arabic numeral system would go a long way. You could probably also figure out distillation. If you aren't too early you could probably invent telescopes, microscopes, and germ theory. And that's without bringing anything other than knowing that those things could exist.

There's probably a good book on practical engineering stuff that would really come in handy. Simple recipes for things like clear glass, gunpowder, interesting properties of coal, navigation, etc.

Yeah idk. Lenses are hard.

It's not the lenses which are difficult, it's clear glass.

With a piece of pure glass, the rest is some emory and a great deal of patience.

Clear glass is also more about knowhow than raw technical difficulty, it isn't the Bessemer process, it's knowing how to flux with soda + add some lead to get the melting point down, then pouring it on lead to get nice flat sheets.

It’s not like you’d be distracted by Twitter, just knowing how it works you could probably work it out with a few skilled glass makers.

Something like this? How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler [https://www.amazon.com/How-Invent-Everything-Survival-Strand...]

Hope a website will work, assuming your trip is not too imminent :)

https://simplifier.neocities.org/index.html

Careful, come back with too much knowledge / science and the catholic church will have you killed.

I think as long as you kept your mouth shut about doctrinal matters, you'd be fine. Almost all of the scientists who go in trouble with the church were busy writing commentary on religious doctrine outside of their scientific work, and that's what got them in trouble generally speaking. The Catholic Church for its faults funded a lot of astronomers and other scientists in the medieval period and into the Renaissance.

While this article focuses on Nouira’s rediscovery of this process, much research has been done on how to consistently create specific colors long before his quest began. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/w...

There is speculation that the Phoenicians made it to present day USA thanks to their advanced seafaring capabilities. [1]

Nonetheless, the same Phonenician explorer spirit contributed to the shaping of what is modern day Lebanon today. The Lebanese, as early as the 1500s and 1600s had strong ties to the regions of Italy and France. This is why Lebanon has been more on the West-leaning side than other Middle Eastern countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Phoenician_discovery...

Relevant: https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/video/the-monologues-blin...

I love articles like this - it's easy to think of ancient peoples as being dumb, but I'm always amused when you come across stuff like this and find there is more in common with them than we often think.

A lot of that is just propaganda. The last 1000 years of western intellectual tradition has be marked by the present zeitgeist propagandizing against the previous zeitgeist.

The western dark ages weren't all that dark, nobody thought the world was flat, Giordano Bruno was an occultist and not champion of natural science, nailing your theses to a church door wasn't a mic drop thing but more like making a forum post, there's even nuance to the Spanish inquisition.

And it gets even spicier the more recently you look!

I have a feeling that since the industrial days we're also very removed from physical reality and only skilled at handling forms and vague concepts. People back in the day had first-hand knowledge of lots of thing in the world.

I’m from where the Phonecians originated.

It makes me sad to see the state Lebanon is today, but ironically part of the reason of the Phonecians’ demise was they didn’t have a strong enough army, relied on mercenaries and ultimately the major city states were not unified.

Funny (sadly) enough, all of the conditions above remain true.

Damn you Alexander

A good read about how a conquered civilization can lose their trade secrets.

The prohibitive cost was one of the reason purple is used only in 2 countries flags, Its even once banned by British royalty except royals to reduce expenditure by commoners.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/country-flags-with-purpl...

https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/free-thoughts/how-te...

A really interesting podcast about this! Apparently the dye absolutely STUNK,

Reply on news.ycombinator.com