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Euro-centric historic chauvinism never ceases to amaze. It is always worth a chuckle to hear for example how "Rome conquered the known world" and your bon mot h
by eternalban 7y ago
Euro-centric historic chauvinism never ceases to amaze. It is always worth a chuckle to hear for example how "Rome conquered the known world" and your bon mot here how "Mathematics was nowhere in architecture, engineering or technology before the renaissance." It is truly astounding.
- CMCDragonkai 7y agoA very small known world. Smaller than most large empires in land area.
- eternalban 7y agoIt's not merely that. It is the willful disregard for the fact that Rome itself was very much aware of Parthian and Sassanid Persia, India, and China. An entire city in Iran was built by Roman prisoners of war! I sometimes wonder if the persistence of this willful disregard, as a pedagogical factor, plays a role in current geopolitical matters which finds the West in disarray as to how to respond to the reemergence of the "unknown world".
- sifar 7y agoEven before Rome, these regions were not unknown. The Greeks even fought them, settled there. One of my personal long term topics[1] to research is how these two hitherto separate schools of thought have influenced each other. The western and the oriental thought may have a common genesis. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism
- superpermutat0r 7y agoI believe you misunderstood me. Take any architecture-engineering book before 14th century, and I mean go back to the dawn of man, and you won't even find Pythagoras theorem. It was all collection of heuristics that worked and the collections were made from hundreds of years of trial and error. Big buildings in Rome were all built with heuristics that had no formulas. Euclidean geometry in architecture is a modern thing.