Meso america
Aztec Technology
Aztec Tools and Weapons
Ancient Aztecs made numerous advancements in technology that benefited their empire's thriving
economy. Some of these advancements were evident in their weapons, tools, calenders and medicine.
Even though Aztecs did not have iron or bronze they found creative ways to create effective weapons to
use during warfare. Instead of using the common materials used to make weapons, Aztecs used
obsidian, chert, copper, and stone. Some of the weapons and tools they made were drills, axe blades,
theatlatls, and the macuahuitls. The theatlatl made a spear easier to throw; The macuahuitl was a club
made of wood that paralyzed enemies. Aztecs also made canoes that allowed them to carry goods
through waterways in the empire.
Aztec Canoe
http://www.pbase.com/
Aztec Calenders
Aztecs used two calenders, one was used to keep time and the other was used to be aware of the
days to praise gods. The religious calender had 260 days, each day of each month was dedicated to a
god. The time calender had 365 days and 18 months, the months consisted of twenty days. Because
natural disasters usually occurred on certain days, five extra days were added to the end of each year,
these days were known as "bad days". If a baby was born on a bad day they were named on a good day.
The time calender is made of stone and it consists of symbols for each day of the month. The symbols
were animals, elements, and objects, such as a crocodile, the wind, or a house.
Aztec Calender
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/
Aztec Medicine
Aztec medical advancements were also an astonishing part of Aztec society. Doctors had cures for
sickness and injuries and also had ways to prevent them. Some of the illness' and injuries that doctors
treated were fevers, earaches, broken bones, and colds. Doctors even had procedures for women to go
through when they were pregnant, such as having a women carry wood ash if she goes out past dawn to
ward off evil spirits that could harm her fetus.
Aztec Herbs used for medicine
http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/
Chinampas
Because there was no fertile land available in their empire Aztecs created land for harvesting. They
called their land chinampas. Chinampas were islands made with mud, silt, and decomposing food on a
reed mat that was on top of water. Farmers planted many trees around the edge of the chinampas so
that the roots would hold the soil and provide an infinite amount of water for the farmland. Aztecs grew
an assortment of vegetables on the chinampas, plowing the food with only sticks and a hoe made of
wood.
Aztec Chinampas
Asia
Science and technology in Asia is varied depending on the country and time. In the past, the Asian
civilizations most notable for their contributions to science and technology were India, China and the
West Asian civilizations. At present, probably the most notable country in Asia in terms of its
technological and scientific achievement is Japan, which is particularly known for its electronics and
automobile products. In recent years, China and India have also once again become major contributors
to science and technology. Other countries are also notable in other scientific fields such as chemical
and physical achievements.
For the science and technology of various Asian countries and civilizations, see:
Creative minds all around the world have tackled the problem of capturing the stream of sounds in
speech and rendering it in written form. The diverse people in regions of Mesopotamia, China, and
Mesoamerica found different solutions to the intriguing riddle. Perhaps the first to write things down
were the Sumerians living in ancient Iraq, who invented a syllable-based system ca. BCE 3000. Much like
modern Chinese writing, each character in Sumerian represented a syllable or idea which combined with
others to form entire words.
Glass: BCE 3000 in Phoenicia
The Roman historian Pliny said the Phoenicians discovered glass-making ca. BCE 3000 when sailors lit a
fire on a sandy beach on the Syrian coast. They had no stones to rest their cookpots on, so they used
blocks of potassium nitrate (saltpeter) as supports, instead. When they woke the next day, the fire had
fused silicon from the sand with soda from the saltpeter to form glass. The Phoenicians likely recognized
the substance produced by their cookfires because naturally occurring glass is found where lightning
strikes sand and in volcanic obsidian. The earliest surviving glass vessel from Egypt dates to about BCE
1450.
Soap: BCE 2800 in Babylon
Around BCE 2800 (in modern-day Iraq), Babylonians discovered that they could create an effective
cleanser by mixing animal fat with wood ashes. Boiled together in clay cylinders, they produced the
world's first known bars of soap.
Ink: BCE 2500 in China
Before the invention of ink, people etched words and symbols into stones or pressed carved stamps into
clay tablets to write. It was a time-consuming task that produced unwieldy or fragile documents. Enter
ink, a handy combination of fine soot and glue that seems to have been invented in China and Egypt
almost simultaneously ca. BCE 2500. Scribes could simply brush words and pictures onto surfaces of
cured animal skins, papyrus, or eventually paper, for light-weight, portable, and relatively durable
documents.
Parasol: BCE 2400 in Mesopotamia
Before the invention of ink, people etched words and symbols into stones or pressed carved stamps into
clay tablets to write. It was a time-consuming task that produced unwieldy or fragile documents. Enter
ink, a handy combination of fine soot and glue that seems to have been invented in China and Egypt
almost simultaneously ca. BCE 2500. Scribes could simply brush words and pictures onto surfaces of
cured animal skins, papyrus, or eventually paper, for light-weight, portable, and relatively durable
documents.
Irrigation Canals: BCE 2400 in Sumer and China
Rain can be an unreliable water source for crops. To solve this problem, farmers from Sumer and China
began digging irrigation canal systems ca. BCE 2400. A series of ditches and gates directed river water
onto fields where thirsty crops waited. Unfortunately for the Sumerians, their land had once been a sea
bed. Frequent irrigation drove ancient salts to the surface, salinating the land and ruining it for
agriculture. The once-Fertile Crescent became unable to support crops by BCE 1700, and Sumerian
culture collapsed. Nonetheless, versions of irrigation canals remained in use through time as aqueducts,
plumbing, dams, and sprinkler systems.
Cartography: BCE 2300 in Mesopotamia
The earliest known map was created during the reign of Sargon of Akkad, who ruled in Mesopotamia
(now Iraq) ca. BCE 2300. The map depicts northern Iraq. Although map-reading is second nature to most
of us today, it was quite an intellectual leap to conceive of drawing vast areas of land at a smaller scale
from a bird's eye view.
Oars: BCE 1500 in Phoenicia
It's no surprise that seafaring Phoenicians invented oars. Egyptians paddled up and down the Nile as
early as 5000 years ago, and Phoenician sailors took their idea, added leverage by fixing a fulcrum (the
oarlock) to the side of the boat, and slid the oar into it. When sailboats were the foremost watercraft of
the day, people rowed out to their ships in smaller boats propelled by oars. Until the invention of
steamboats and motorboats, oars remained very important in commercial and military sailing. Today,
however, oars are used mainly in recreational boating
Kite: BCE 1000 in China
One Chinese legend says that a farmer tied a string to his straw hat to keep it on his head during a
windstorm, and thus the kite was born. Whatever the actual origin, Chinese people have been flying
kites for thousands of years. Early kites were likely made of silk stretched over bamboo frames, though
some may have been made of large leaves or animal hides. Of course, kites are fun toys, but some
instead carried military messages, or were fitted with hooks and bait for fishing.
Middle East
Cryptography
The art of writing and deciphering hidden messages, known as cryptography, was practiced by pharaohs
in ancient Egypt.
In the 8th century, Omani grammarian Al-Khalil al-Farahidi wrote the first book on cryptography. His
theories gave way to today’s data encoding for cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and more.
First flight
In the 9th century, the first man to fly - at least for a few moments whilst wearing a bird costume - was
Abbas Ibn Firnas . He was of Berber origin and born in Andalusia, Spain.
Ibn Firnas achieved this feat hundreds of years before the Italian artist and inventor Leonardo Da Vinci’s
flying contraptions emerged, and the advent of the American Wright brothers’ airplane.
During the 3,000 years of urbanized life in Mesopotamia and Egypt tremendous strides were made in
various branches of science and technology. The greatest advances were made in Mesopotamia—very
possibly because of its constant shift of population and openness to foreign influence, in contrast to the
relative isolation of Egypt and the consequent stability of its population. The Egyptians excelled in such
applied sciences as medicine, engineering, and surveying; in Mesopotamia greater progress was made in
astronomy and mathematics. The development of astronomy seems to have been greatly accelerated by
that of astrology, which took the lead among the quasi-sciences involved in divination. The Egyptians
remained far behind the Babylonians in developing astronomy, while Babylonian medicine, because of
its chiefly magical character, was less advanced than that of Egypt. In engineering and architecture
Egyptians took an early lead, owing largely to the stress they laid on the construction of such elaborate
monuments as vast pyramids and temples of granite and sandstone. On the other hand, the Babylonians
led in the development of such practical arts as irrigation.
During the 3,000 years of urbanized life in Mesopotamia and Egypt tremendous strides were made in
various branches of science and technology. The greatest advances were made in Mesopotamia—very
possibly because of its constant shift of population and openness to foreign influence, in contrast to the
relative isolation of Egypt and the consequent stability of its population. The Egyptians excelled in such
applied sciences as medicine, engineering, and surveying; in Mesopotamia greater progress was made in
astronomy and mathematics. The development of astronomy seems to have been greatly accelerated by
that of astrology, which took the lead among the quasi-sciences involved in divination. The Egyptians
remained far behind the Babylonians in developing astronomy, while Babylonian medicine, because of
its chiefly magical character, was less advanced than that of Egypt. In engineering and architecture
Egyptians took an early lead, owing largely to the stress they laid on the construction of such elaborate
monuments as vast pyramids and temples of granite and sandstone. On the other hand, the Babylonians
led in the development of such practical arts as irrigation.
With the spread of case law in such conditional formulation, it was eventually discovered that
formulation as generalized propositions or prohibitions was a simpler and more logical means of setting
up a coherent code of laws than the case-law formulation (e.g., in the Hebrew Decalogue). The next step
was the formulation of generalized geometrical propositions. This was first done by the Ionian Greek
Thales (about 600 BC), whose listing of mathematical propositions in this generalized form instead of as
conditional sentences was quite naturally described later as the “discovery” of mathematical theorems.
With Thales logical reasoning made a giant step forward from the age of empirical modes of thought.
The Judeo-Christian concept of ethics and morals in law often prevailed in the Roman law of Christian
times. Roman forms of law were ultimately adopted in almost the entire Western world, and through
their universal sway many biblical approaches to legal problems became dominant.
The alphabet
Of all the accomplishments of the ancient Middle East, the invention of the alphabet is probably the
greatest. While pre-alphabetic systems of writing in the Old World became steadily more phonetic, they
were still exceedingly cumbersome, and the syllabic systems that gradually replaced them remained
complex and difficult. In the early Hyksos period (17th century BC) the Northwestern Semites living in
Egypt adapted hieroglyphic characters—in at least two slightly differing forms of letters—to their own
purposes. Thus was developed the earliest known purely consonantal alphabet, imitated in northern
Syria, with the addition of two letters to designate vowels used with the glottal catch.
This alphabet spread rapidly and was in quite common use among the Northwestern Semites
(Canaanites, Hebrews, Aramaeans, and especially the Phoenicians) soon after its invention. By the 9th
century BC the Phoenicians were using it in the western Mediterranean, and the Greeks and Phrygians
adopted it in the 8th. The alphabet contributed vastly to the Greek cultural and literary revolution in the
immediately following period. From the Greeks it was transmitted to other Western peoples. Since
language must always remain the chief mode of communication for Homo sapiens, its union with
hearing and vision in a uniquely simple phonetic structure has probably revolutionized civilization more
than any other invention in history.
Africa
The history of the sciences in Africa is rich and diverse. In ancient northeast Africa, those regions such as
Egypt, Nubia and Aksum that had evolved large, complex state systems, also supported a division of
labor which allowed for the growth of science and the more practical technologies involved with the
engineering of public works. In other parts of Africa, in the various city states, kingdoms, and empires
that dominated the political landscape, science and technology also developed in various ways. The
applied sciences of agronomy, metallurgy, engineering and textile production, as well as medicine,
dominated the field of activity across Africa. So advanced was the culture of farming within West Africa,
that ‘New World‘ agricultural growth was spawned by the use of captives from these African societies
that had already made enormous strides in the field of agronomy. In her work Black Rice, Judith Carnoy
demonstrates the legacy of enslaved Africans to the Americas in the sphere of rice cultivation. We know
also that a variety of African plants were adopted in Asia, including coffee, the oil palm, fonio or acha
(digitaria exilis), African rice (oryza glabberima), and sorghum (sorghum bicolor). Plants, whether in
terms of legumes, grain, vegetables, tubers, or, wild or cultivated fruits, also had medicinal implications
for Africans and were used as anesthetics or pain killers, analgesics for the control of fever, antidotes to
counter poisons, and anthelmints aimed at deworming. They were used also in cardiovascular, gastro-
intestinal, and dermatological contexts. Some of these such as hoodia gordonii and combrettum caffrum
are being integrated within contemporary pharmaceutical systems.
The African landscape is dotted with the remnants of walled enclosures of various dimensions in
Southern Africa and West Africa. The irrigation terraces of Gwoza and Yil Ngas, Nigeria, and the
earthworks of Benin are major testimonies to the engineering activities of ancient West Africans. The
Benin earthworks have been estimated about 10,000 miles long by the archeologist Patrick Darling. The
totality of all the irrigation terrace lines or contours in Gwoza, northeast Nigeria, may be on the order of
20,000 miles, according to researchers such as White and Gwimbe, who have done extensive work on
this subject. Various architectural styles emerged in the region with a propensity for sun dried clay in the
West African Sahelian region and East Africa. Obelisks, stelae, sphinxes, flat topped and peaked
pyramids, walled enclosures called zimbabwes, sculptured temples, terraces and beehive, circular and
rectangular dwellings, are among the wide variety of engineered structures of Africa.
After the 3rd century B.C.E., a process of cross-fertilization among the ancient Egyptians, Nubians, and
Aksumites of Africa; their Mediterranean neighbors in Greece; and the Semitic peoples of Western Asia
ushered in one of the most dynamic eras of scientific discovery the world has yet known. The Egyptian
port city named after its Macedonian conqueror, Alexander the Great, became the locus of this
extraordinary scientific energy. The Library of Alexandria, built apparently on an ancient Egyptian city,
contained at its height well over a million books. While some European scholars of an earlier era
categorized the remarkable scientific achievements emanating from Egypt during that period as
essentially Greek, it is now apparent that the greatness of this epoch actually resulted from conjoining
Northeast Africa’s three thousand years of accumulated scientific knowledge with that of their ancient
Greek conquerors.
It has been suggested that Egypt’s first significant scientific document, the so-called Edwin Smith
Papyrus, was initially written 2500 years before the Greek conquest of Egypt in 332 B.C.E. Hellenized
Egyptians like Claudius Ptolemaeus, Heron, and the female mathematician Hypatia helped lay the
foundations for what later European scholars came to label the “Greek sciences.” This may be in part
because the educated Egyptians of that later era wrote in Greek or a derivative language of ancient
Egyptian called Coptic, which employed the Greek alphabet. The various papyri, most of which are
named after non-Egyptian personalities and towns, ironically, are significant repositories of the ancient
scientific knowledge of northeast Africa. The Edwin Smith papyrus remains a remarkable scientific
treatise on surgery. Of the 48 cases described, 27 concern head injuries and 11 skull fractures. Some
have posited that the classification of head wounds of Hippocrates, 460-377 B.C.E., derived from the
Egyptian Edwin Smith papyrus. Egyptian medical papyri also include the Ebers Papyrus of 1500 B.C.E.,
devoted to cysts and boils—perhaps the first treatise on cardiology; and the Kahun and Carlsberg Papyri,
primarily devoted to gynaecology, and dating back to 1820 B.C.E. and 1300 B.C.E., respectively. The
Chester Beatty Papyrus of 1200 B.C.E. was primarily devoted to rectal ailments. In these various papyri,
we have case titles, diagnoses and prescription, and presentation of data in an organized fashion. The
reasoning used is largely inductive and experimental. From analyzing these documents, we know that
their authors clearly recognized the effects on the lower limbs of brain injuries, attained familiarity with
the nervous system, and indicated knowledge of the circulation of the blood. The ancient northeast
Africans gave us the earliest known description of the brain.
Our word “chemistry” derives from “al-kemi.” The ancient Egyptians had applied this term meaning “the
black land” to themselves. We should note, however, that some contemporary scholars interpret
“kemit” to refer to the dark richness of the Egyptian soil, while others suggest that the term “black”
refers in this instance to the skin pigmentation of these ancient peoples. In various parts of Africa,
chemical principles were applied— especially in the leather tanning and cloth dyeing sectors. Indigenous
distillation systems emerged in the process of the brewing of beer and other fermented beverages in
various regions of Africa.
