What’s crazy is that in 1000 BC there was a complex economy which enabled complex textile weaving and clothing stitching and construction.
I try to imagine the circumstances which birthed these pants, the economy of dyes, of looms, of seamstresses.
Were they made by a person within the family? A slave?
Where they produced commercially?
Were they traded?
I try to imagine the people and tools that enabled this in 1000BC
And the lively open markets that merchants potentially sold these through. The stacks of paints, dyed different colors, with different patterns, ready for purchase by passerby’s.
1000BC.
This is pre-Roman.
This is at the beginning of Greek civilization, which catalyzed around 1200-900BC.
It’s remarkable to think they were making pants like this.
Always reminds me that humans haven’t changed much at all.
I imagine our disposition to be fairly consistent across thousands of years.
I also imagine that the knowledge to produce these pants, either by one person or an economy, took hundreds of years or more.
Right?
Like the process of agriculture, or growing fields of cotton or linen or whatever this is made of, of perfecting the art of spinning the fibers to consistent size, of tight weaves, of incorporating patterns, of the dyes likely imported from some distant land, like India (indigo)
I always wonder how much older certain knowledge is.
We see artifacts and buildings that have somehow survived the erosion and entropy of nature, as well as intentional human destruction and defacing. And we say, ah this is the oldest!
We don’t know if that specific article or artifact represents the pinnacle of the time, or of the millennia or culture.
It’s usually just a fragment. Perhaps it represents the lowest skill and quality?
Perhaps it’s simply what remained?
I like to think that ancient civilizations have reached peaks comparable to Greek and Roman and Egyptian civilization, beyond 10,000 years ago.
But they have been destroyed by nature of man. Or cities have been built upon them.
In the America’s there’s ample evidence to suggest mass agriculture and farming. The ancient ruins now covered in over grown jungles were once situated on plains with elaborate cities, with no jungle for miles. Once the civilization fell to war or disease nature simply resumed and overgrowth buried and eroded all the evidence of greatness.
Over the millennia looters dug up and destroyed what evidence did exist until all that remains are rocks.
And we find these organized rocks and conclude a vast, yet “primitive” culture once resided here.
But i do not think that is so.
I think humans have not changed much at all. I think that it doesn’t take very long for a civilization, blessed with the right resources, to rediscover natural truths and develop sophisticated technology and tools, which surpass what we imagine they are capable of
William Dare 