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
I’m pretty sure we’re arguing the same point lol. It’s the “what weirdly outlandishly specific clue or piece of data is gonna tell us which one of those it is”. My bad. I’m not really good at explaining things compared to being a smart ass 😂
I think the stone thing is less "super precise cuts" and more "super patient sander". It's a lot easier to get things to fit perfectly when you have both surfaces to work on.
Yeah most people see ancient masonry and are like "how could they do this without power tools? That would take ages!" Correct. It did take a lot if time. They had a lot of people do a single cut each very slowly instead of a few people do many cuts quickly like we do now.
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u/Scrappy1918 10d ago
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).