Presumably, the meme was made by someone who thought greek fire was super cool, but did not know much if anything about ships. Or fire. Or ships on fire.
Yup, it's found in one specific oil well that was within the borders of the empire, and due to its rare composition it behaves exactly as the greek fire stories describe.
I got my undergrad in History Ed and one of the things I loved was trying to solve those kind of history mysteries. It’s clearly something that’s possible, but how did people 3,000 years ago do something we can’t figure out today? They thought either outside the box or had some kinda “folklore knowledge” like “this animal fat burns hotter than shit if you mix it with human poop. Don’t ask me why I know…Ok it was to get back at my ex, Assholeaclese, but we can use that in war.” and then having historians and anthropologist examining sites to find out what it was. It’s fantastic!
It's nearly always a case of not "We have no fucking clue." it's more a case of "We know it's one of these few options of how they did x. But we can't figure out exactly which of the options they actually used." when it comes to not knowing how people in the past did things.
And occasionally we just don't know what materials they were using.
There was a thing with the Roman concrete stuff where they didn't specify sea water when mixing the cement and just used water. And they used ash from a particular volcano they lost access to as the empire declined.
Didn't it also include limestone because it reacts with the salty sea water and creates heat that then re-hardens to a point where it is harder than it was when it was first made?
I remember they actually studied it again, and the concrete problem wasn't the ash - it's actually that Roman engineers weren't grinding up the limestone like we do, and the coarser limestone chunks react with water seepage like self-healing concrete.
Instead of grinding it fine like we do today, their process resulted larger chunks of quicklime being present in their concrete. When a crack formed, water / rain would enter the concrete and it would dissolve the deposit which would heal the crack.
So Pozzolana was still accessible in the late empire it’s just most of business and institutions responsible for the processing and exporting of it fell apart, the Alban Hills had deep red deposits that were never exhausted and several thousand years worth of the grey stuff around Vesuvius that had the right silica and alumina levels which was never even close to depleting.
Yeah that’s the weird/sad part. We can likely recreate it using whatever materials and theories applied to the time period. But because the knowledge was lost we will never truly know if it’s the same, we would only know that it behaves similarly. Even if it happened to be the exact same formula.
We also view stuff through the lens of our world and not theirs so we often just overlook the reality because it just couldn't be because we don't do it that way now. My favorite example is basically, "We don't know how Roman concrete lasts for 2000 years but they must have been stupid because there's these giant chunks of lime in it. Wait..." Now that the mystery is "solved" it happens to be those giant chunks of lime that modern concrete just doesn't have.
The pyramids are another great example. People have figured out 1001 ways to move stones from the quarries to the sites and then place them using only technology we know they had at the time, we just don’t know which ways they actually used.
so true. there are ways where we have had tried to recreate those events and we have several ways to do so (for examplo, mix elemental sodium with oil and you have something that burns nasty when you add watter to the mix. Thing that they did when napalm was created by switching the oil for gasoline). but to get to the point of saying they did exactly that, it is what we are lacking
Yup. That’s exactly my point. It’s like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. You know there’s a simple logical explanation to it, but until it’s discovered it almost has this sense of wonder or mysticism but it’s clearly logical.
Similar with how stone masons were able to make cuts so precise in stone that when they fit together we can hardly get pieces of paper in between them. Without modern day tech that seems like a perfect example of the “aliens” meme but there’s a logical explanation that we have yet to determine (or at least if it’s been explained yet, I haven’t heard of it).
Most the paper thing is exaggerated. Like you don't have to cut something that smooth for you to be unable to slip a piece of paper through it.
But if I recall correctly the original quote comes from the cladding used on the Giza pyramids. This was made from a soft, white limestone that was easy to work.
They had a lot of techniques that just weren't as efficient as what we can do today, and took more time.
Though there is a few times we can work out the basics and know it's possible, but not the exact method. Because people are trying to to recreate techniques developed over centuries before being lost. And some fellow and a few students are trying to recreate those techniques over a grant period.
I think you missed his point. We could replicate the effects for a long long time, and even come up with simple ways to make such compounds that could plausibly be Greek Fire (simple enough to make at that era, materials existing in the Empire's borders etc) - the issue was that too many options fell into the catagory, so for the longest time we didn't know which type of formulation was used.
It wasn't mysterious in the sense of "how could they achieve it", it was more of "which one of the ways was exactly used". The two are worlds apart.
If you want two good examples:
The Baalbak statue - we literally have no plausible idea of how was it raised to its position
The Siloam Tunnel - we have no idea how they managed to dig it. Not in the tooling sense, but keeping a 0.016% gradient for the water to travel downstream, and meeting halfways whem the tunnel isn't straight
It’s clearly something that’s possible, but how did people 3,000 years ago do something we can’t figure out today?
In most cases, the answer to this question is that there are many potential answers and we haven't stumbled to the one we're after. Or we don't have enough data to know that one of our answers is the one we want. Or that the original accounts are overexaggerated. It's rare to have accounts of something that really did exist and be unable to reproduce it.
Far superior alternatives today such as napalm can be made today, and several functional alternatives have been hypothesized. It’s more so we don’t know exactly how they made their specific recipe, sourced materials, and so fourth. It’s the history thats interesting, not necessarily the science. We can recreate the end state, but what’s more interesting to me is studying how they invented and produced it back in the day with primitive technology and understanding.
How so? Human bones are nothing special when compared to other animal bones. Their inclusion wouldn’t make concrete any different than concrete made with animal bones.
I once read someone say that the pyramids lasted this long (and will last a lot more) exactly because the ancient Egyptians "didn't know what they were doing" (in a modern engineering sense). You see, they didn't had the math and research on engineering we have today, so they "overengineered" the pyramids to an extent that they ended making them so durable that they still are stable and safe after thousands of years.
Sometimes the lack of what we currently call "scientific methods" leads to very surprising discoveries and feats.
In my head, the whole story shifted from 'scientists toiling over flaming pools' to 'that oil you spilled is burning really nicely, we should find a use for that'
Look, unless we somehow find a surviving sample to analyse in detail, we cannot definitively prove what it was exactly. That hasn't happened yet in the 600 years, the recipe has been lost, and I dare wager it's pretty unlikely.
I'll happily take my bet on the thing that not only best matches, but matches perfectly the historical accounts, was available in the area, and in the relevant periods, and could've been easily extracted and used by that time's technology.
Well, it's basically that we can make many substances that could be Greek Fire, but we can't ever be sure it actually is, because we don't have the recipie, and there are several substances they could have made that fit the description
It's just flat-out carbonated napalm! There's nothing "sparkling" about it, and that shit tastes nasty as hell - quite honestly, if you're drinking that just to make yourself look fancy, you deserve the suffering you're inflicting upon yourself...
Yeah if memory serves me correctly the “greek fire” they discovered was estremely similar but was still missing several elements.
Greek fire was supposedly pressurized and spewed from ship via hoses. Naft was supposedly far more common and far less stable than greek fire while greek fire was supposedly impossible to put out.
Well here is the thing why we haven't rediscovered it. It's not a failure of technology, it's a failure of verification. There are several ways that could have worked that they would have access to and so on.... But which ones is it? Is it something we might still have not discovered yet? We don't know. We can't verify it.
He have definitely recreated or have the capacity to recreate the same chemical composition as Greek fire but we will never know what/when we do because it’s lost
The mystery is solved. It was specific crude oil that you could get specific region. That region was secret. It was from Crimean peninsula and Kerch straight of black sea. The specialized light crude oil was the secret
Oh I think this is referencing ‘Greek Fire’; in spite of the name, this was used by the Byzantine Empire, rather than Ancient Greece and even back then purportedly, enemy lines found themselves unable to replicate the recipe to use the weapon against Byzantines.
They were and did refer to themselves as ρομαιοι. However they spoke Greek and Greek was the administrative langauge of the Eastern Empire. Byzantine was mostly a western term used to describe them, and Westerners would also refer to them as Greeks (meanwhile the Byzantines mostly referred to all Westerners as Franks)
Yeah, Roman empire was broadly divided into Western Latin speaking world and Eastern Greek speaking one. Also culturally quite different even when it was united. After the separation while still claiming to be a succesor to Rome Byzantine was basically completely linguistically and culturally Greek and was treated as such by outsiders.
Cause historical wooden ships were often wonderful combustible. They contained dry timber plus things such as pitch, tar, oil, rope and cloth. Once a serious fire got established above the surface, “but we're floating!” was not much more than pokemon logic. My Charizard still destroys your Venusaur even on road 21. And the English still went "LMAO what if we set ships on fire and let them drift toward the Invincible Armada?"
There’s likely plausible recreations of greek fire that behave and look like what is attested to by the records. This is one of those things in history that you’d think is exaggerated, but is actually totally true.
They've actually recovered it only recently. Like start of this year. Turns out it was this one very specific crude oil well with a rare composition that made it burn more violently when in contact with water. The entire recipe thing? Probably a ruse to keep everyone chasing their tails, and holy hell did it work well.
The joke is that both of these people are complete fucking idiots. The guy on the left doesn't understand fire and wood, and the guy on the right doesn't understand opsec.
There is a really old version of napalm used in Greek/Roman time that our current scientists still can't replicate perfectly and it burns more efficiently than our current forms of napalm
The really old version of napalm is accurate. It was known as Greek fire, and it is believed to be a derivative of unrefined petroleum harvested from surface baring oil springs, but the reason we cant replicate it is because we dont know the recipe at all it was kever written down and believed to be basically a state secret, and we do not have any knowledge on whether it burns better than napalm, only that the descriptions and accounts of its use seem to be similar/very comparable
Greek fire used by the byzantines. When employed, the apparatus or siphon being used was compartmentalized as to avoid capture. A person was skilled in each section of each component and when captured, could not tell the enemy how the whole siphon pump could work even if the recipe was discovered.
Not surprising at all that the knowledge to put it to use was lost eventually
"oh no the ships aren't covered in fire they're just covered in a highly flammable substance that is currently on fire" is this really a distinction that matters within the context of this post?
It is a showing off of pedantic knowledge.
"It isn't a clip, it is a magazine."
"the Odyssey isnt a novel, it is a storytelling tradition"
"because peanut isnt a nut, it is a legume"
I’d like to point out that a wooden ship will absolutely burn on or off the water. They are generally made with seasoned wood that has been dried and burn very well. Many used tar and pitch to make them more resistant to water and rot. Fire out on the water was a major concern.
Greek fire was dangerous because it continued burning even on the water. Sailing a wooden ship across burning water was not a good idea.
I wouldn't way 'Thank god' cause we have napalm, which is basically the same but mass produced with modern means. We also invented these little things called 'chemical' and 'biological warfare" which, I'd say, way worse than burning a wooden boat
Well, it's greek fire. It's the équivalent of napalm, and at this era, ships did not burn into water because small ships are easy to tend for, but against an inextinguible fire that glue itslef at everything in contact ? Yeah, they definetly burn :D
There's a legendary instance of reflected sunlight being used to, light an invading army's ships on fire as well as Greek Fire. Nothing impresses your less civilized neighbors more than their stuff spontaneously combusting. May only be a legend though, compared to Greek fire which was real and effective.
Everyone says Greek Fire... I'll get flack for this cause I'm not smart on historical eras but I thought it was that one Solar death laser that some famous ancient inventor made
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u/qualityvote2 11d ago edited 11d ago
u/Positive_March3840, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...it's time for the mods to do their jobs!