(March 25, 2017 at 8:04 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote:

(March 25, 2017 at 8:01 am)Jörmungandr Wrote: Youtube videos about ancient civilizations is crackpot material.  Shame on you, Atlas.

Are you implying the University of Youtube isn't fully accredited?

(March 25, 2017 at 8:06 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(March 25, 2017 at 8:04 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Are you implying the University of Youtube isn't fully accredited?

If it isn't, 43 of my 44 degrees are in serious jeopardy...

Boru

Quote:PaleoBabble readers know that ancient astronaut theorists suffer from a fixation on megalithic construction. The “impossibility” of moving stones of great size and tremendous weight appears to them as proof of alien assistance. This argument of course is simply reduced to “since I can’t figure out how it was done, it must have been aliens.” Rather than focus on the absurdity of this logic, I’ve tried to introduce readers to peer-reviewed scholarship on ancient construction and engineering. Egypt’s pyramids have received a lot of attention here in that regard. I want to turn now to Baalbek, specifically the famous trilithon (the three stones at the base of the Roman temple at the site).

Quote:On a winter night in 373 B.C., the one-two punch of an earthquake followed by a surging tidal wave destroyed the grand old Greek city of Helike, near the Gulf of Corinth. The city was, coincidentally, a venerated center for worship of Poseidon, the god of earthquakes and the sea.

The land and the city ruins sank beneath the sea, and all the people were said to have perished.

(March 25, 2017 at 10:07 am)Khemikal Wrote: The egyptians (3000bce), the greeks (1200bce), and the vikings (300ace)?  Do you see the problem with imagining them to be historical firsts...right out of the gate, before we get into any  other details?

Civilization was already well under weigh by 6500bce.  

(March 25, 2017 at 11:41 am)Anomalocaris Wrote:

(March 25, 2017 at 10:07 am)Khemikal Wrote: The egyptians (3000bce), the greeks (1200bce), and the vikings (300ace)?  Do you see the problem with imagining them to be historical firsts...right out of the gate, before we get into any  other details?

Civilization was already well under weigh by 6500bce.  

That depends on what you call civilization.

(March 26, 2017 at 10:07 am)vorlon13 Wrote: Ancient civilizations ??

If they didn't have powered La-Z-Boy recliners, surround sound big screen satellite TV, and Funyuns, they weren't civilized.

(March 25, 2017 at 11:01 am)Minimalist Wrote: Humans did not fly before the invention of the hot air balloon.

Quote:The first records of man-lifting kites come from China. The (636) Book of Sui records that the tyrant Gao Yang, Emperor Wenxuan of Northern Qi (r. 550-559), executed prisoners by making them fly with bird-shaped kite wings (see ornithopter). For his Buddhist initiation ritual at the capital Ye, the emperor parodied the Buddhist ceremonial fangsheng 放生 "releasing caged animals (usually birds and fish)".

Quote:On one occasion the emperor visited the Tower of the Golden Phoenix to receive Buddhist ordination. He caused many prisoners condemned to death to be brought forward, had them harnessed with great bamboo mats [quchu 籧篨] as wings, and ordered them to fly down to the ground (from the top of the tower). This was called a 'liberation of living creatures'. All the prisoners died, but the emperor contemplated the spectacle with enjoyment and much laughter.[1]

The (1044) Zizhi Tongjian records that in 559, all the condemned kite test pilots died except for Eastern Wei prince Yuan Huangtou.

Quote:Gao Yang made Yuan Huangtou [Yuan Huang-Thou] and other prisoners take off from the Tower of the Phoenix attached to paper (kites in the form of) owls. Yuan Huangtou was the only one who succeeded in flying as far as the Purple Way, and there he came to earth.[2]

The Purple Way (紫陌) road was 2.5 kilometres from the approximately 33-metre Golden Phoenix Tower (金凰台). These early manned kite flights presumably "required manhandling on the ground with considerable skill, and with the intention of keeping the kites flying as long and as far as possible."[3]
In a story about the Japanese thief Ishikawa Goemon (1558–1594), he used a man-lifting kite to allow him to steal the golden scales from a pair of ornamental fish images which were mounted on the top of Nagoya Castle. His men manoeuvered him into the air on a trapeze attached to the tail of a giant kite. He flew to the rooftop where he stole the scales, and was then lowered and escaped. In the 17th century, Japanese architect Kawamura Zuiken used kites to lift his workmen during construction. George Pocock, who invented a kite-drawn buggy in 1822, had previously used kites as a method of lifting men to inaccessible cliff tops, but it was not until around the 1880s that there was serious interest in developing man-lifting kites.