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To gold plate you only need 3-6v which is possible from 5 or 6 batteries linked in series. However a copper/iron lemon battery will only produce 0.00024 Amps. You need 2-3 Amps for plating. If the battery had a similar output to a lemon battery you'd need around 20,000 batteries in parallel to provide 2.5 Amps. This would only give you 1v. To achieve the 3-6v needed for plating, they would have needed multiple banks of 20k parallel batteries. Meaning anywhere between 60,000 - 120,000 Baghdad batteries to provide 3-6v and 2.5 Amps.
We have a joke in Romania about how advanced were ancient civilizations. One day, German archeologists found at 5 m deep, some copper wire. They concluded their ancestors, the Goths and Vandals, had some primitive subterranean telephony system. Not wanted to be under Germans, French archeologists dug at 10 m deep and found some glass remains. They concluded their ancestors, the Celts and Gauls, had optic fiber communication. Not wanted to be bellow Germans and French, Romanian archeologists, dug to 15 m, nothing, 20 m, still nothing, 30 m nothing yet. They concluded, our ancestors, the Dacians and Gets, had wireless communication.
That’s a great joke but since you said Romania just wanted to say that I’ve just learned of the “Varna culture” of the balkans where they were goldsmithing in 4000bc and they’ve found more gold in one grave there than the rest of the world combined for that time frame.
I'm reminded of the old joke: If an archeologist says something was for used "ritual" or "ceremonial" purposes, they have no fucking idea what it is. Unless they say it was used for "fertility rites", that means they know exactly what it is but don't want to write "Ancient Dildo" in the logs.
Not a joke, but the cold hard truth Same as field biologists; Specimen released in field- It means you got bitten and dropped the fucker. Impromtu Disection means you stepped on the critter.
If the jar was indeed a “battery”, I can’t imagine it was anything more than a curiosity or party trick made to make people go “huh, that’s kinda neat I guess”
Whoops I just got zapped by the jar... let's show this my ancient friends.... places jar in the corner of the room and immediately completely forgetting its purpose... and now the archeology society completley breaks their heads over the use...
@@Flt.Hawkeye That is genuinely my theory on it. Someone tried to store multiple things in 1 jar, got a tingly feeling when he touched it, went “huh that was cool”, and then proceeded to completely forget about it
@@Mjgaming54321 reminds me of a scene in the book Little Town on the Prairie, where the late-19th century teens are having a birthday party, and the one of them training to be a telegraph operator gets his guests to stand in a line holding hands and gives them a mild shock as a party trick. The author, Laura, is flabbergasted and doesn't even realize what she felt was electricity until the host explained it.
The papyrus storage device theory actually makes some sense to me. I'm an engineer and one of the things we do with underground piping and electrical wiring is called cathodic protection. It involves inducing a very small electrical current in the soil. Electrons will naturally move in wet soil according to a difference in charges, especially those between a metal and naturally-occurring salts. This movement will corrode most metals over time, and can also accelerate disintegration of organic materials. In cathodic protection we introduce materials (anodes) which the current "prefers" over the piping, so it will corrode those sacrificial anodes rather than your functional equipment. If this was the idea for these devices, you wouldn't put your papyrus in the same jar as the acid, but rather place a functioning battery device nearby your storage jar to protect it. And a voltage of 1V would probably be enough for that purpose. The setting fits the logic here. But obviously I'm speculating; as you said, without context we will never be sure exactly what these jars were intended to be for or if the inventor even understood what they did. But this hypothesis at least is well established in modern science and engineering.
That is an fascinating take and I had not seen a single other source discuss it like that! So you think the battery could have actually been a part of the storage unit that helped preserve the papyrus? That is a really interesting interpretation and seems very logical. I wonder why we don't see technology like this for storage in other places. Perhaps the climate here called for it or it was stored in a damp environment.
@@miniminuteman773 Cathodic protection is pretty common where you have underground systems that pose a big problem if they fail and that are intended to last more than 20 years (e.g. oil pipelines, hazardous chemical supplies, marine docks). The principle's been around since the 1820s but the technology has only been in common use since the 1920s. Since it requires regular maintenance and costs to design and install, it's not used for most low-risk situations. As for why we don't see it archaeologically... it's certainly possible the galvanic reaction was observed by one person in particular but since the technology wasn't there to understand it, it never came into common use. Plus, since the 'battery' has to be 'recharged' frequently it might simply have taken too much effort to be worth it. Again, ALL speculation here. But it is the standard design for tanked water heaters... You probably have one in yours and weren't even aware! 😉
@@CaelanAegana but wouldn't that still require the papyrus to be submerged in an electrolyte solution? If it's sealed in a separate jar, there's no pathway for the electron flow to include the papyrus. So far as I know, the longest surviving examples of papyrus have come from arid environments
@@jawsbert it's honestly a best guess given what little is known about these things. If (BIG IF) that was what they were trying to do, they almost certainly didn't fully grasp why it worked. But no, there wouldn't need to be solution in the papyrus jar, because the Cathodic protection would have been applicable to the jar's exterior (specifically the iron bit), to keep it from deteriorating and letting water inside. No contact with water = preserved papyrus.
@@CaelanAegana ah, okay. I assumed when you said it could accelerate the deterioration of organic materials that we were talking about protecting the papyrus directly, rather than protecting the container. Thanks for the clarification
Hi! Physicist with chemistry experience here! One thing I’d like to say is that I have no problem believing that ancient cultures made things that fit our current definition of “battery” just by chance. I’d actually be genuinely shocked if accidental “batteries” weren’t somewhat of a common occurrence. The question is what was it USED for? A battery is something that uses a chemical reaction to get charged particles moving. A “battery” in and of itself isn’t that special: two types of metal which act as “opposites” in terms of how well they want to grab electrons and a medium for them to travel through is it! The context that matters here, is that finding a “battery”, no matter how well it works, is almost certainly meaningless without a circuit.
and I mean, when your cathode is a copper tube, your anode is an iron rod, and your electrolyte is just a bath of lemon juice, it doesn't exactly make a very good battery, and I'm pretty sure it won't power any alien device, make a led light up maybe, but it won't send you to space. that is why some people proposed that it was used for some kind of galvanization processes that was discovered by accident, but I'm not sure that is how galvanization works, unless what you are trying to galvanize are the iron rods, and we would have found evidence of galvanized metals.
as a historian - I am reminded about the stories of Ben Franklin and his batteries - he would hook them up to play pranks on his friends and enemies... and to watch frog twitch under an electric probe.
It's so sad the Egyptians had lightbulbs and the Iraqis had power, but they never met to combine them. Imagine how much more advanced we would be if they'd had that chocolate-peanut butter moment!
@@yvonnethompson844 ??? And my comment wasn't meant to be an insult believe it or not. You're probably the type that has a lack of understanding regarding tonal changes and social ques, you need to grow up too. You can't make any meaningful connections if you don't even know how tones and social ques work.
I just had a realization: this could be a fermentation crock. Vinegar is a fermented food after all. The copper and metal part be used to keep plant matter submergered, or as a gas valve. Those metals might have been used because they could be sterilized easily, or because they would react to the vinegar when it was ready, acting as an indicator the vinegar was ready. After vinegar is done fermenting, it’s sealed up to keep it fresh until it’s ready for use. The papyrus might have been used as a permeable cover to keep dust out without blocking air from the culture (or as a label, or to pull out a bit of the vinegar to test its taste)
This is the theory I was waiting to be explored as well! The moment I heard wine and vinegar I was like, "Oh! So fermentation..." Maybe we'll get a part 2 lol
Adding to that copper is also a fungicide and reacting with the acid would dissolve it into the liquid and the food. Its not exactly healthy but then romans were eating from lead plates hundreds of years later and even modern humans use tons of toxic materials because of convenience or because the long term effects werent known like asbestos or plastic softeners
It's an ancient paper shredder. When the ancient FBI was coming for ancient Enron, they dumped out their pots, filled them with acid, and started destroying the papyrus trail.
I know you meant it as a joke, but I kind of wonder if it was something along those lines. An elaborate, ceremonial (😋 I know, I know), definite way to destroy a papyrus in this world and the next. I wonder if they DID put a papyrus in the jar with acid, maybe it was a curse or a broken oath or treaty or something. An acid paper shredder that might give someone a little zappy zap if they picked it up and tried to open it. Like if simply burning the scroll wasn't enough and you just wanted a little something *extra* so that even the gods couldn't read it (burnt offerings went right up to the gods, after all).
@@octoscorpion2506 probably wasn't, judging that no acid they had would be strong enough to damage the cellulose the papyrus is primarily made up of. Heck, few acids WE have would do it. Cellulose is tough stuff, that's why trees use it.
Ammonia or bleach would do a better job of that than acid. Bases are much more destructive to organic matter than acids, in general. And ammonia is easily acquired from urine, so frankly it’s more likely that they just had stale urine on hand for its many varied uses than some chemically useful acid, the most likely sources for which would be fruit juice or vomit. Not exactly likely that they’d intentionally vomit to acquire hydrochloric acid, either. So it’s really just fruit, which likely wasn’t very powerful acid, and certainly wasn’t strong enough to break down cellulose, or the fruits would dissolve themselves.
When you started saying "Why don't we just study the artifact", my original thought was that it was lost during world war 2. It really caught me off guard when you said how recent the loss really was.
This is what I love about discussing sciences. Sometimes you get things wrong, and this kind of civil discourse is soooo refreshing. Thank you for showing this and talking about it! Just watched part 2 thought I was there lol
@@SerialElfYT xenophobia is natural, racism can only exist with an understanding of what races are which people wouldn't, if they hadn't been taught by racists.
I'm sure it was making the connection from "someone who is woke to racism is also woke to sexism and it's sexist to have a woman make you something for related". Not that that is any more thought through given how the interaction went and how he's carrying himself in all his videos.
the ceremonial issue reminds me of the fact that a lot of ancient houses in scotland open to the east, with some historians linking this to a worship of the rising sun (to be fair, there is a lot of east-west burials so there is some evidence) - ignoring the fact that we're a rainy island facing the atlantic and that most of the wind and the rain would have come from the west, something you wouldn't really want your entry facing
Both could be true, but I find that ceremony follows practicality. As in something that we do as a ceremonial thing had a far simpler and purely practical purpose at one point that led to the addition of the ceremonial aspects.
I also don't like the fact that we always chalk stuff up to religious purpose, like, maybe humans just like being bathed by sunlight when they start their day... We have a lot of costumes that are present for long periods of time that have more to do with broader cultural identity than with just religious.
this reminds me of a funny thing i saw like this once, where there was some sort of ancient homes being studied. they kept finding them to frequently have knives tucked away on top of beams that supported the framework of the house, way up high at the ceiling. they wondered what it could mean, debated if it was a religious tradition, what the symbolism could represent, and so on until one of them realized "oh, duh. they had kids. they didn't want children to get into the knives so theyd keep them out of reach."
I think something that gets overlooked by archaelogists is that sometimes, artifacts could be one off experiments. The Bagdad Battery could have legitimately been an experiment with electricity that, for one reason or another, was abandoned. We usually want to assume that things survive history because they worked, or were significant. But sometimes things just survive. Just a thought.
And also another thought: Those experiments estimated the output of a theoretical battery with local materials around 1V. Let's imagine old folks were really efficient and used nice metals and concentrated acids. Let's give them 300% efficiency, and say the battery has 3V. How would you detect 3V? We have amazing led lights capable of working of 1V, but how would you, as a normal person, detect 3V? 1V is barely detectable by a tongue. It feels slightly sour, because "sour-ness" is just our brains interpreting free available protons in acids / from current. 3V is noticeably sour, but you've just poured real acid into the battery, it wouldn't feel strange. So how would you demonstrate this to someone for any purpose, let alone use it?
Yeah, its like, people forget that in history inventors like Hero existed, who just used their time and money to invent things more to prove they could than because they were going to change the world with practical applications (He invented a very rudimentary rotary steam engine and proved you could get useful work out of steam, then moved on to other projects and his mathematics)
@@Dorsidwarf the aeolipile. Hero (or Heron) invented it as a toy. He invented a whole bunch of impressive things, not all for toys, including the first coin operated vending machine. Not devised by Hero, but another example of a seeming one off, and probably the best example because the technology seems far ahead of other things at the time is the Antikythera mechanism. It's apparently not all that technologically advanced for the day or even all that hard to make, but the concept/design was far more complex than anything else found at that time.
If you presented these things to me out of context (as in, tiny jars, one with papyrus in it, one with traces of acid, and with a tube/cylinder combo that fit into each other), my first guess wouldn't have been "battery", but "some kind of tool for secret correspondence". Roll the papyrus around the cylinder, put it into the sealed tube, and immerse it into a jar full of acid, then seal it before sending it. At this point the only way to safely unseal the message is by breaking the jar itself, as if you tried to get the tube out first, the acid gets to the papyrus, and by the time you unroll it from the cylinder, the message is destroyed. This way nobody could sneakily open the message on the way to its destination and then re-seal it, making it a counter-espionage tool, and there are no records of this, because it was a state secret and/or only used in a limited fashion or a short time. Now, I'm not saying that the jars were used this way, I'm just trying to illustrate that there's a lot of potential alternative utilities between "it's ancient high tech" and "it's ceremonial".
I like how if future archaeologists dug through the landfill of a small town there would be zillions of alkaline batteries and light bulbs, because when a society uses technology like that it actually /uses/ it. The fact that there’s just one “battery” and one carving of a light bulb shows it wasn’t actually electricity or electric lights.
"How'd they do it in total darkness?!?" So I guess people back then knew how to create giant light bulbs and electricity to power them but fire is a fringe concept.
@@eugenideddis Right? Oil lamps are quite literally the most stereotypical Middle Eastern object. Also, I imagine wood isn't something that's plentiful in Mesopotamia and the Levant. So wood are reserved for making building frames, weapons (spear shaft, arrows, etc) and Fuel for high intensity heat (cooking, furnaces) than to use them for light
how did the workers in the inner chambers of the pyramids see in there while carving stone for hours on end? theres not enough ventilation to light fires in there you will suffocate before long
@@pilot.wav_theory The Pyramids ain't built from up to bottom... It's built from the Bottom up... You know, like any buildings built on this planet ever? So, by this very BASIC logic, the inner chamber walls were built and carved before the "roof" (the tip of the Pyramid) and ceilings are set... That means the ceilings are not there yet, so you can work by using, you guess it... Sunlight, Woahhh! Mind blown 🤯🤯 I know right? Really Amazing groundbreaking stuff that took a lot of brain power to think about
@@pilot.wav_theory A few actual facts: -Never once, not in any capacity, has the remnant or mention of anything electrical ever been described in the times of which the pyramids were built. Not one single piece of supporting theory, not a scrap material goods. -The only thing anybody has to go on is the aforementioned artifact of which dates to a different time period in a far away region. -The drawing in the temple literally describe what they are. There's absolutely no confusion on what they represent. As noted in the video and elsewhere, the temple carvings were likely done before they roof was put on, providing ample light. each chamber in the pyramids would have had a ton of time before they were covered in which they could have been carved. And even so, oil lamps won't burn up all of the O2 in the chambers. They were not sealed off to the outside world until everything was done. One other thing: Unless they had some kind of hyper efficient filament technology, they weren't going to be producing much light at all. As such those batteries wouldn't have enough capacity to last very long. So there'd be massive caches of spent batteries laying around.
I think some ancient guy made these as a startup and pitched them to the ancient middle eastern version of Shark Tank. But then ancient Mark Cuban pointed out that there wasn't anything for the batteries to do because light bulbs wouldn't be invented for over a thousand years. And that's why there's only 4.
Considering we've only found a few of these in the same remote region, it's possible that this was a singular discovery by one person and he never revealed it to anyone. Maybe he actually did accidently figure out how to plate something, or just thought the shock was cool, but either it didn't fully work or he died shortly after and they just sat there doing nothing for the rest of time. I think "eccentric guy throwing stuff together to see what will happen" is something we don't consider enough with these types of things.
I mean... that's pretty much how a lot of stuff was discovered. Granted the people had some scientific knowledge about how stuff works but by and large it was typically some dude just trying a lot of stuff out.
It's like the "words of unknown origin" that seem to my ear to be like the kind of words I'd make up one day if I wanted a cutesy- or silly-sounding or "ad hoc" word. It's almost like we somehow think only contemporary people could be unserious. What the hell?
The Motel of the Mysteries plug literally made me gasp - I read that book once as a kid and I've thought about it roughly once a year since then but I've never been able to find it!
Man, that museum story gets me. We still periodically find stuff the Nazis hid that we didn't even know went missing. We'll be finding artifacts from that museum for decades
Anything remaining is likely in a collection of sorts as the Nazi's were selling a lot of it off for profit. A good large portion of it definitely made its way to Russia and the US though.
@@josephpowell2850 im am pretty sure that the museum that had that spinosaurus was completely obliterated during a british firebombing air raid. we will never get those particular fossils back. 😥
There's loads of stuff in museums around the world that is in desperate need of documentation and additional preservation efforts, but for various reasons these archives continue to be neglected. And then there's all the shit that various people, most notoriously the nazis, hid away. Who knows when that stuff will all be found.
The Baghdad battery wasn’t used for a light! That’s just ridiculous! That carving wasn’t a lightbulb. It was their highly advanced snake launcher, which they used to fight off the ancient aliens. The Baghdad battery only put out one volt because that’s all it needed. They were that advanced.
Hearing about all the missing and broken artifacts genuinely tore at my heart- at least some were returned but centuries of history just being lost like that just hurts, especially after hearing how much the staff desperately tried to protect them in the first place
Personally I'm a lot more bothered about the half a million innocent civilians the US military killed during that war by using "scorched earth" tactics (which, if you don't know, means destroying all food and water sources within an area to starve their enemies...also every other person in the area who doesn't evacuate).
@@WildBluntHickok hey dude did you know two things can upset a person. In fact, many things can. People don't have one single thing that upsets them. That's not what we're talking about right now. This is a video about archaeology lmao
A detail you didn't mention: The clips with people demonstrating these “working replicas” invariably use a single LED. That's a completely different technology from an incandescent light bulb. Even a light bulb dimensioned for flashlights draws several orders of magnitude more power than an LED to even begin to glow. So these “working replicas” are, in fact, not working.
The dry-humor no-bullshit tone of this channel is extremely refreshing. As someone who grew up watching the History/Discover channels before they declined, I sorely miss genuinely educational and entertaining history programs. This channel is definitely scratching that itch.
As a child of the eighties, I cut my teeth watching "In Search Of..." ("Great Mysteries Of The World" here in Australia) Sunday afternoons and spent 1981 to 1988 learning about 'Ancient Egypt' from primary school until the end of junior high school. When I had the choice to study ancient or modern history in senior high school, you know what I chose. Another year of Egypt and a some fun outside reading of magazines like Fortean Times lead me to very interesting conversations with one of the kids who could keep up with me in maths class (apparently I was a disruptive student and was not allowed to take chemistry in senior high for some of the stuff I did in physic involving firecrackers in yr 10). One of the discussions was Egyptian jar batteries. For some reason, I remember these being reported as being found in 'the pyramids' and were copper and zinc rods sitting in large jars along the halls of various Egyptian site. Of course there was no other mention of them outside of the magazine (what I considered at the time a wonderful monthly allminnack of insanity that made for great party conversations) and my ancient history teacher dismissed as rubbish (and told me to keep smoking pot as it means one less kid to teach), but yeah, there is somewhere some assertion the the Egyptians of the first kingdom had electric batteries! On a related topic, I have taken to telling cold-calling solar panel sales people that I am Ra and that they are stealing my energy, and that they own me millions in unpaid rates. This tends to work most of the time in the "you hang up, no you hang up" game but I did get one guy who lost his shit at me for saying I am god and I did have to hang up first :(
The description of the "batteries" got me thinking, as painter it's common to store brushes only used for thinner based paint in paint thinner as cleaning them is more effort than it's worth. Just imagine some guy in 2000 years digging up a shed and finding a sealed jar with a brush and paint thinner inside and everyone starts speculating what kind of highly advanced apperatus they found.
huh... good point. everyone fixed on asphault since it's an insulator but it's probably just an ordinary damned lid. And asphault would be good (er) at keeping stuff in than most ancient alternatives.
Yes, the tragic case of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, whose destruction was ordered by the Taliban in 2001, shows intriguing similarities with the destruction of Artemis Temple: the eradication of a monument, sacred as well as emblematic and belonging to the cultural heritage.
I had a similar thought as well. “What if these jars that have nothing in common are filled with different things…were just jars used for storage ?” I paint as well as do miniatures and 3d printing and have about 20 different containers full of things ranging from chemicals, brushes, tools and such. I don’t finding hard to believe someone else in ancient history may have needed storage solutions for their hobby or profession.
Yeah, despite it being able to generate an electric current, nobody is willing to theorize its purpose assuming that property is coincidental. Perhaps it was just acid.
It all started with one unhinged man, now it's a complete team with a researchist, an editor and a mixologist? Damn, I can't wait to see what this channel will become in a couple of years xD
That bit at the end about the National Museum of Iraq genuinely turns my stomach. I don't know how I was never aware of it before, but seeing those smashed cases and things is unbelieveably upsetting to me. Thousands of irreplaceable artifacts, the stories and traces of millions upon millions of human beings who once lived and died, stolen for profit or perhaps destroyed. Horrible.
Honestly, if you think that is upsetting, then your not gonna like what we did to the middle east in general.... Baghdad was a major thriving city, and had nothing to do with the terrorists that came to america in 2001. but, the US didn't care, we bombed that city, and its never been the same. We DESTROYED an entire city, filled with millions of people, people that had wives, husbands, daughters, sons, grandparents, markets, schools, churches, etc. outright KILLING entire families, wiping out generations of people. we committed genocide after genocide....just because we had an inkling that they had something to do with the terrorists. Ancient knowledge and education is nice, but honestly i think modern day people, people who have lives RIGHT NOW, are a bit more important. And don't get me wrong, this looting of artifacts, which as you said, were "the stories and traces of millions upon millions of human beings who once lived and died" is a MAJOR TRAGEDY by itself. We might not ever find the stories of many of those people ever again. Those people are now lost to the ever present thing of time, just because of someones stupid desire for war and bloodshed. Michael Moors documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 )ii think it was that one anyway) includes scenes from the bombing of Baghdad, and how the civilians who lived there reacted, and how they suffered because of that bombing. (i upvoted your comment too, FYI, it deserves to be seen, read, and understood)
@@alericjohansen6775 I don't disagree with your comment at all, what the U.S./Coalition forces did was an atrocity that continues to ruin peoples lives to this day. But I do hate that it's impossible to make a comment like the one I left without someone jumping on and giving the "but what about..." comment. Just because I didn't explicitly mention something doesn't mean I am not aware of it and angry about it. Sorry, I still don't disagree with you at all here, I just really don't like how people online seem to expect that every comment must address every aspect of a situation. It makes discussion impossible because every comment would need to be a 25 page essay just to meet everyones standard. (I think this comment comes off more hostile than I intended. I'm not mad at you or anything here, your comment is accurate and perfectly reasonable. This is just the bit my brain got stuck on this morning)
@@WarningPuzzle True, your comment can come off as hostile (i didn't read the 1st part as that hostile, more just making some good arguments, but the 2nd part did make it clear you werent trying to be), but technically mine can too. But, i think its hard to hit on such a subject without invoking someones anger/rage, so its to be expected. You are right though, trying to meet the standards of everyone WOULD mean a 25 page essay (or longer, as the history of things can get quite complicated). And your also right, just because you didn't explicitly say some other aspect, doesn't mean you aren't aware of it and angry about it. Im glad that you are aware of that stuff. Too many people that I talk to/argue with online don't even seem to care. Too often i see people not even care that people are suffering. And WAY too often i see people take GLEE in the suffering of others. Different experiences between us I guess.
It still somehow shocks me that people can't mourn the permanent loss of ancient history, through the destruction of incomprehensibly priceless and unique artifacts that through unbelievable odds survived millennia, without knuckle-dragging, mouth breathing morons screaming about sADdaM hOOSaiN blah blah weapons of maSs DesTrUCtiOn, OORAH, every five fucking minutes.
If the Parthians did use the Bagdad battery for material plating it was probably for galvanization not gold plating. Yes this requires zinc, but Zinc was commonly traded in the Mediterranean at the time (the Romans used it to make Brass). Galvanizing can be done with low voltages (it just takes longer), yet galvanizing tools makes them last longer before rusting. A galvanized tool will not rust until the entire galvanization layer has broken down, after which it will start to rust normal, but the break down of the galvanized layer would explain would explain why no examples of galvanized tools can be found as the galvanized layer would have already broken down completely.
not to mention that, being batteries, they can be connected in series to up the voltage. To me that was the largest oversight in this video, even if it doesn't necessarily change the conclusion.
honestly this is the most believable theory to me other than "some guy was just messing around with some pots and stuff". ancient people were really resourceful and i wouldn't be surprised if someone out there figured this out just by accident
@@AlexCauthon This is how it works in theory yes, but the important thing to remember is that voltage is only one aspect of electricity. The problem is that the connectors, the very wires themselves which allow you to put things in series, have their own resistances and impedences, and a capacitive effect with other wires in a circuit. Connecting batteries in series isn't a linear relationship, as at these ultra-low voltages, just making the cable too long would incur an unsustainable loss of current through resistance. Even if you could get dozens of these batteries linked in series, you would still be dealing with extremely low current as well, and you would need quite an extreme number to do any meaningful work (and learning how to make components which require electricity to work is a very different problem than getting the electricity in the first place) All of this to say that if ancient scholars were indeed aware of the properties of this battery, they would have quickly realized that this is a very inefficient way to do this. If they had the knowledge of electricity, they would have found a better power source that scales more appropriately, and if they didn't have this knowledge then this most likely isn't a battery.
It's certainly better than "people say", or "looks like". I also feel like some of these shows want us to believe that the word "possible" means "probable".
@@Michael-bn1oi ok, caveats exist. Thank you for covering my blindness, but only in actual research work. If you're the student and trying to pass your midterm or write your thesis, you are very much expected to know. But, therein draws the line of what's necessary or superfluous, right?
I imagine someone saying this, then turning to look out of the window of the old Land Rover that they're riding in and observing the vast desert landscape outside. "But there's a lot of un-dug desert out there" followed by heavy breathing as he clutches a spade and trowel.
At some level, I have to wonder if either: A. these were a one off experiment by someone living in antiquity that just happened to notice that putting copper and iron in acid got him mildly zapped, and then made a couple more to try to figure out why, and when he died, got buried with them because no one else ended up caring about it, or B. Someone in the 1930s found tiny clay jars and had an idea. It wouldn't be the first time someone from the dark ages of archaeology decided that fame and fortune was more important than history.
That B part could be true but I slightly have some doubt on it ... I read that the claim by Wilhelm König that the jars dated on Parthian era could be a misnomer, and has been said that the style matches that of the Sassanids era, the Era succeeded them. I hope they did a C-14 dating on it before the Iraqi war happened cause I can't find that information as a Layman... Because it's really hard to fake a Radicarbon dating... I guess not impossible, but really not worth the hassle
My thoughts on the entire theory. It proves they COULD HAVE, made batteries. But NOT if they did. Fact is we know they chose not to. But everything needed to make a battery was right there. Adam Savage agrees with this. They had the ingredients but for whatever reason they chose not to. Bonus fact: it would be about as good as a cheepo modern AA.
Yah. If this is really a battery it was likely a situation similar to heros engine. The ancient Greco-Egyptian steam engine that was pretty much just a toy without practical use.
In the manufacture of gas dispensers (or pumps), one task is to peel the backing material off of adhesive vinal graphics and stick them onto the plastic pump doors. A tool we used for this is a 3M deflater tool. Basically an ink pen like device with a needle, that comes out and retracts. At a cost of around $35 each. Wanting one of my own, I made one from a ball point ink pen, a copper or brass tube, and a stainless steel sewing needle to replace the ball point pen's ink barrel. To solder the stainless steel needle into the brass or copper tube, required that I electroplate it with copper first. A plastic container, a bit of copper wire as my source of copper, And a liquid copper sulfate solution obtained from an aquarium supply store mixed with salt water And a used AC to DC wall wart, allowed this. The small AC to DC power converter was 6 volts, And it allowed me to copper plate the needle and solder it securely into the tube. The voltage and amperage determined the time required to coat the stainless steel with copper electro plating. 6 volts took about 15 minutes. 6 volts @ 200 mA I considered the maximum save DC voltage I considered for doing this electroplating experiment, it could have been less and just taken longer. There are other chemical mixtures that will also do this. As a builder of antennas, I still hold this copper plating method in reserve for soldering dis-similar metals together. I am not an academic, I as a mechanic and electrician, simply made things work.
Imagine being 6 episodes into the best idea for a series ever and it being so radically different, better, and more chaotic than the first. I love this series and I love that shirt and want to steal it.
I appreciate your conclusion after shooting holes in all the theories by admitting that you honestly have no idea what it was for. "I don't know" is a perfectly valid response that many many people are afraid to say.
It’s also even more stupid than calling it what it is. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. What would be so catastrophic about ancient civilizations utilizing batteries in one single country on the earth?
@@ghost-user559 -- If they were useful, we'd see more of them. Since this is the only observed instance, they were either bad at their intended purpose, a novelty that didn't catch on, or a secret that wasn't revealed. Maybe it was a battery, but that wouldn't mean a whole country was using electrical equipment, just one guy or maybe one village. If we knew where it came from, we could learn so much more, but we do know that nobody at the time cared.
@@TlalocTemporal I find that to be an utterly ridiculous conclusion. Tell me oh great genius, would there be any recorded trace of a SINGLE thing we have said or done online, including this conversation, if something as simple as the server hard discs at google were buried in a mudflow, or we failed to retain the ability to generate power after some worldwide cataclysm? Would there be a single record of anything stored digitally if something as simple as an extraordinary solar flare blanketed the earth? And you act as if an instruction manual would be readily available thousands of years later? You act as if simply because YOU say so, that everything must be neatly discoverable millennia later. How many millions of urns and how many TONS of pottery have been discovered and “cleaned” or outright discarded in the past several THOUSAND years? Would a museum prior to this century even have the slightest idea to test specifically for ph before cleaning? Would such a discovery have even been noticed before WE had electricity? A kindergardener can light up a series of lightbulbs with a POTATO. I hardly think that in all of human history and throughout all spans of every civilization we only just discovered either electricity or its uses. But again what makes you think any such record of such a thing would ever be discerned by us, if this conversation itself most certainly would not exist in any tangible form, nor would the sum total of modern human progress, if we simply unplugged the mainframe our conversation resides upon as we speak? Only fools (archeologists and scholars) are under some narcissistic delusions that if they personally did not discover something that is does not exist. Because we don’t write in stone any longer as citizens, hardly a single recorded thing our entire civilization has done or said would so much as survive a power outage, much less “leave records” in any single tangible medium. What makes you think that tiny clay and presumably disposable jars would leave a single trace of their purpose outside of a highly preserved environment. There are MANY worldwide inventions from many civilizations and tribes which we retain merely one example of common items during their era, one single knife or some idol or trinket which is the only evidence we have for “how they lived” in that entire epoch of humanity? And yet you see no issues with extrapolation in those instances which have less physical evidence than this? If we consider batteries consumables to this day, and expensive for special purposes, why would they not be disposable and expensive then? There are images all over the earth of various “magical” devices. People with “glowing halos” or “glowing faces” or “glowing auras”, and history is full of examples of alchemists and emperors scheming up advancements in technology. What would arc lighting or some amateur filament look like to an outsider besides magic? I have no doubt that MANY such people invented MANY ways of utilizing electricity. It’s utterly ridiculous to assume otherwise simply because we had no idea to properly LOOK for such evidence.
@@ghost-user559 -- CDs have binary data etched directly into metal foil. Just one disc in a swamp would preserve that quite well. Modern computers have many examples of intricate manufacturing and using electricity for logical computing protected inside heat-resistant inert plastic cases, surrounded by metal. Even if all the paper records were destroyed and all the magnetic tapes and flash memory were wiped in a massive solar storm, any mildly preserved electronic device would display a deep understanding of electrical handling, petrochemicals, data manipulation, material science, and quite possibly consumerism. Many servers still use hard disc drives for their reliability, so there's a not insignificant chance of some server somewhere keeping a copy of this conversation etched in metal buried in mud somewhere. Decoding all the data formats would be a monumetal task though. Most importantly, there are trillions of smart electronic devices. You can't hardy go anywhere on land that doesn't have a hundred CPUs within as many miles. There's billions if not trillions of miles of copper cable lining almost every dwelling on the planet. We've made so much stuff that getting rid of it is a gobal issue. There's exactly zero chance that we leave no trace of having electrical, informational, and spaceflight tech if we were wiped out today. Fusion tests, direct genetic manipulation, machine learning and AI; these are all rare enough to possibly be missed for a long time or be lost, but even things like fission power and weapons, prosthetics, and quantum tech is far to widespread to just be missed. If even one city was using electricity even semi-commonly, we should see hundreds of these pots, all with a similar metal insert with a single rod out the top. Yet we see only one instance. Perhaps one king had a wonderous firestarter, or a few alchemists were messing around with oxidation, but there was certainly no industry around producing electrical cells for lighting or refining metal with chemistry. At best, we find a previously unmentioned and undiscovered city that has hundreds of there, along with the equipment for utilizing them, and was somehow lost to time, taking their knowledge with them. Until that discovery happens though, there is less than zero evidence for any significant usage of whatever these pots with metal inserts were.
@@TlalocTemporal Most of that copper from those wires would become simple deposits given enough time. And magnetic discs are utterly worthless for 99% of humanity, can you even fabricate any single component of a silicon wafer? Much less reinvent optical drives, motherboards, capacitors, and all of the software and infrastructure required to even BOOT a computer, much less READ a disc? Not a chance. Or much less compile CODE without any idea what the functionality of such a disc even is? Bullets do you no good if you have no concept of a rifle or any knowledge of gunpowder. It’s a shiny hunk of brass to the unenlightened. How many millennia did it take to solve something as simple as basic hygiene and plumbing? You severely underestimate historical catastrophe and its effects upon the earth. One single carrington event, a single or series of Chicxulub type impacts, or even a sizable seismic cascade or a fault line slip with mega tsunamis is adequate to destroy access to all of the servers in North America. Any one event could do so. Not to mention something as simple as a single super volcano such as Yellowstone, or the activation of the New Madrid fault could cause enough tons of ash and liquefaction, and even flooding to bury most of North America and south America forever. We have absolutely no idea whatsoever the capabilities of natural forces. We come from an epoch of relative dormancy. We have evidence of entire continents beneath other continents, slid under oceans, or covered in polar ice. You have no assurance at all this cycle is even normative, and all evidence would indicate this brief span of earths existence is NOT the rule but an exception. Most of earth has been chaos and upheaval and catastrophic events. Imagine what an ice age would cover up? We have literally found mammoths with GRASS in their belly frozen solid. Meaning they literally froze solid in place while grazing fresh grass. We have absolutely no context for global seismic or volcanic activity, or tsunamis that swallow continents, or continents that fall into the sea or under another. Despite your lack, or humanities lack of awareness, MORE of earths history was like that then the short space we measure as “history”. Our “history” is a theoretical construct not an objective reality. Really we have no idea what is even at the bottom of the majority of lakes and oceans on earth, much less under the ice caps or beneath the Saharan desert. It’s hubris at best, and mediocre education at worst that would lead you to assume that a person who found a single piece of modern electronics would have any method of determining what it is or how to use it. Especially because most of it would be rusted and mineralized fossils at that point. One single event and entire continents can vanish overnight. Enough of those cyclical events and things start over. We have absolutely no idea how many times humans have reached this epoch of civilization. No idea at all. We don’t even have any idea what the ancestors of the Egyptians lived like, or who the sea people or Minoans really were, much less any practical understanding of what happened in even fairly recent ancient Europe. We are intellectually scavengers. We piece together bits and pieces and that becomes the consensus of “history”. No one would have any idea at ALL whatsoever how to access a single byte of data on earth if something as simple as electricity was taken from our civilization, much less quantum computing, ai or genetic engineering. Virtually no evidence of us would remain in a few hundred years on the surface given a large enough cataclysm. We don’t even know what is at the bottom of the sea. Were we put there, would anyone even know we existed beyond bits of useless trash? No.
Gotta give respect for being able to say "I don't know what it is." People make so many mistakes trying to find a definitive answer when they don't have enough information. Society definitely has to get more comfortable saying "I don't have enough information on this subject to present an informed opinion." rather than trying to make up one.
I’m a literure teacher and I just taught Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” today; when my student asked why there was all this knocking and curtains fluttering but nothing there, I just told him, “Spooky vibes. Poe was big into spooky vibes.” Sometimes the casual explanation is clearest. 😂
@@tonyjohnson8752 It is hilarious that you point out how they misspelled literature as 'literure' only for you to misspell the word even more. You wrote 'liturere', whether you were trying to write what they did or the correct word you failed.
my personal favorite theory about the baghdad batteries is that some ancient guy was running an experiment to see if he could make anything cool happen and that they didnt "really" do anything. Just some sort of fuck around and find out moment
I honestly think this is the 'solution' to tons of historical mysteries. Ancient people were still people just like us and i don't know about you but i do goofy shit all the fuckin time for no real reason.
The classic mythbusters episode from 20 years ago was also great..they were hesitant to even cover it because they thought so little of it scientifically and labeled it hibbity jibbity hahaha, and were like sure it might have religious purpose to give people a faint buzz..but definitely not a battery
@@KaladinVegapunk omg was that the episode where the producers made them electrocute Adam and he was extremely pissed off about it? And Kari's terrified "did you feel god" as her eyes said she knew they went too far.
@@danielled8665 Ahh horrific nostalgiac memories. Fun fact: the original producer was fired after that little stunt. I felt so bad for Adam (and Kari and Grant and Tory.)
I am half a century old. I am so glad the world has a you. FINALLY, the younger generation has an intellectual to listen to on a level they can understand. Good on you, sir. I hope you live a thousand years. With your level of income. And progressive technology. You might be here a grand or so.
As much as "ceremonial use" is a running gag in archaeological circles, I think it makes a lot of sense for the Baghdad Battery. If you have no conception of electricity and you grab a sacred object and it makes you go all tingly, that's going to feel like a religious experience to you. At least, religious chicanery has always been my guess about what they were for.
that was actually the theory the mythbusters tested. they electrified some statues and concluded that yes, with enough jar batteries, you could make a gold idol that gave you some tingles when you laid hands on it. not a completely implausible answer.
Was that the episode where they made "An Ark" or something, and made Adam touch both of the statues and he got smacked by a shock from hell, destroying his trust in them and really straining their relationship? They were all giddy before and while it happened, and he was dumbfounded they believed it to be funny and thought it alright to lie to him that it isn't charged or anything funny like that.@@Saibellus
@@japanesecar1501 Supposedly that was heavily encouraged by a director who they all ended up disliking and who got fired from the show eventually. Im pretty sure Adam ended up forgiving the rest of the crew about it. Also the lie was that they told him it was attached to the baghdad batteries, when they had actually attached it to an electrical fence generator, which Adam was very right to get angry at because the current that passed across his heart genuinely got close to killing him.
it can definitely cause you to have a heart episode, the amps should have been small , but the shock is real, real. I believe fences for livestock differ, but commonly are 15ish kV, and fences for thick skinned mammals even 25-50 kV? I am now intrigued as to what the wattage is. I think "shock amps" to kill even an elephant could be anywhere from 3-10 times higher than a mans(it´s said 50mA through the heart is enough to disrupt with consequences, and will kill you with prolonged exposure, but it used to be a common experiment at a Czech university(atleast there, possibly all around the world), where you signed a waiver, and the prof let you feel the current with increasing intensity, topping out at 150 some mA of passthrough current for a bit, but that is my teen memory speaking.@@nabagaca
@@brianmeans5965 The conspiracy theorists' version of "I don't know" is "aliens did it". The archeologists' version of "I don't know" is "ceremonial purposes".
"Stole this pillar from a gravesite. Ah yes, it looks so much better in my living room." My first thought: "Ah, proof positive that he really is an archeologist."
I remember talking to a friend studying archeology who told me "whenever there's a place with lots of seats and a pedastel and no explanation, archeologists just decide it's a sort of a 'church'/'ritual site' even if there's no further proof of that" and i found it so bizzare but with this video i see that's a common practice of "we don't know what it is so it must be X"
It's Occam's Razor. You start by assuming it's the most likely thing, and when you disprove that, you move onto the next most likely thing given the current evidence. It's more productive than disproving a long list of unlikely but possible things only to end up determining it's a temple 90% of the time.
@@battlesheep2552 there is a difference between considering the possibility of something and acknowledging it may be incorect rather than outright claiming it as fact though. it is also kinda questionable if you can really say something is "most likely X" just because you personally think it looks like X.
@@elio7610 I think non scientific outlets are to blame in this case. To acknowladge a theory's limitations is expected in academic circles, but media outlets often ignore caviats when trying to tell a cohesive narrative. Since this is how most of the public learns about science it results on assumptions becoming facts in the mainstream.
First thing I thought of when the acid at the bottom of the “battery” was my father making a mechanism for setting up a triple A battery to “safely” add voltage to his alcohol. Gave a quite literal buzz to the drink. Humans do weird things for weird feelings, always have always will. Maybe this is an example of that?
It was actually really satisfying to hear "I don't know" as an answer, instead of accepting or making up something half-baked just to have an explanation. Also ooh a PO Box, I wish I knew where my old copy of Chariots of the Gods was, I'd totally send it. I was such a huge fan of Erich von Daniken when I was in high school.
There is a video here on youtube of someone playing Doom on a potato. Okay, a couple hundred potatoes powering a graphing calculator that runs Doom, but still. So besides the obligatory "Doom runs on a potato" joke, it proves that even potatoes can give enough electricity if you chain up enough of them. Lemons or vinegar would be much more potent. The problem is rather that stuff gets off too fast.
The toilet thing reminds me that a museum did that kind of thing (in France) : they took broken parts from a 1900's water pump, and other similar devices, and let people try to guess what they were (without indicating the age). There is also a TV show people people come to have antiques being expertized, and they had a segment where people would bring "unknown stuff" usually found in a barn, so that the "experts" would identify them. Sometime they could guess what it was, or had seen similar stuff, but other time, even knowing who owned it (a carpenter in the 1930's) they couldn't make any kind of guess on what it could be. Of course it doesn't mean no one knows, but, if we cannot properly recognize things that were made just one century ago, it kind of makes you wonder how we could ever hope to identify the purpose of one or a few items made millenias ago, that came without context and are not mentioned in any antique source.
This inspired me to see if my dad has any old mud knives they're things that help with mudding sheetrock I don't know how to describe it Google it. But I'm going to take the fancy plastic handles off of a broken one soak it in something so that it rust and then show it to a person interested in archeology have them guess what it is before telling them it's a mud knife
oh my god! I had the book of diagrams for this exact thing! it was about the motel they "dug up," and guessed the uses of the archeological objects they found, right? or am I completely off?
In the Middle East and south asia, some people still store water in copper jugs to purify the water. My MiL (peninsular Arab) swears by it. She's from the older generation in a rural village so she grew up doing all of the traditional processes for food preparation. Even crushed her own wheat.
The Concept of those jars reminds me of a method ancient atheneans used to make synthetic pigments: they hung a piece of copper into a jar, put vinegar and/or other acids in there, put the lid on top and finally after some while they used the copper carbonate that formed as patina to mix green pigment. This technology was used besides producing mineral pigments (I can't find descent dating or examples on the spot but saw it in the acropolis museum)
Wow yeah that seems like a great explanation!! The acid in the jars could have been used probably to solely pigment or tint/patina the metal as I know you said it was also made for dyes so it could have been a multi purpose tool
@@tek4 yeah its crazy so much stuff can be done in jars maybe if they weren't taken from the place they could have found more, perhaps other jars had other chemical mixes and was like a rudimentary chemistry lab hahaha
For that matter, that would be a plausible route to making a battery by accident - you're just trying to make some new shade of paint and accidentally invent the tingle jar. Of course it's still not useful for much besides pranking your friends and/or convincing them you've captured a demon in a jug. (Insert "bottle of djinn" joke here I guess).
When you clarified the term asphalt it reminded me of how it being mistranslated led to the victorians eating all the mummies, I'd love to see you do a video on that weird time in history.
Well done! The Enrichment Center reminds you that although circumstances may appear bleak, you are not alone. All Aperture Science personality constructs will remain functional in apocalyptic, low power environments of as few as 1.1 volts.
Potato juice can be used as the electrolyte in a battery, along with electrodes made of two different metals. This artefact has the electrodes with two different metals, so that’s what makes it interesting.
Potatoes where not part of the Old World at that time. And this is why there are not Pyramids in Europe... amoung other reasons or lack or reasoning......🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
My only regret with finding this video series is that its just at its beginning, so I shall have to wait so long for enough content to do a solid binge.
I remember reading somewhere that since the jars were exposed to the elements, it is possible that any papyrus or parchment inside had completely rotted away, leaving a trace of slightly acidic organic residue. So, by that theory, it wouldn't be that they put acid inside but that it was just created over time
This video certainly lends new insights to my work on a dried up potato that I found in a desert cave. It had two rods buried in it, one copper and one zinc. All this time I'd been working on the theory that ancient indigenous tribes were trying out new ways to cook potatoes. Thanks for your help.
I grew up in an extremely religious (young earth believing) family. My dad would do a Bible study every day with us and there was a time where he talked about this battery, the "light bulb" from the other video, and a ton of other artifacts like these with a huge young-earth conspiracy theory lense. It's extremely good for me to learn about what these artifacts were actually were... Healing lol
People don't really realize just how much Young Earth Creationism is legitimately a conspiracy theory, with all the negative connotations that brings with it.
I graduated with my degree in archeology in 2009… if you’re doing the math, yes you’re right, I never used it… because yes, you’re right- there were absolutely no jobs. Ty for this channel. It’s lovely to share watching it with a group of like minded humans who appreciate your rational takes. ❤
If you don't mind me asking, what do you do now and what was your favorite thing about your degree/ something you specialized in? You deserve to share your passion too and I'm super curious about archaeology so I'd love to know :)
I have a Master's degree in literature, and I work the exact same minimum wage job I worked prior to starting my studies (luckily it's Norwegian minimum wage, so I'm okay). It's a shame the interesting rarely overlap with the profitable in this world.
I’m confused, sorry… why would a grad date give me a clue as to if you’ve ever worked in your degree field? I’m not great in math so maybe I’m missing something 😅
Listening to these theories I can't get over how insane it would be if 2000 years from now the only evidence that our society ever used electricity was a single AA and a mural of a lightbulb somewhere
Our plastic waste isn't going anywhere. If humans are still around in 2000 years, which I really doubt we will be, landfills will tell them everything they would ever want to know about us.
the AA battery though would be pretty unambiguous. It's too weird a collection of things with too many little optimizations to be much other than a mass manufactured thing in competition.
Science Educator here.. I LOVE telling students, “That’s a great question! I have no idea. 🤔” It’s so important to normalize not knowing. It’s the fuel of science. And for this Google Generation, I feel like it will be even MORE uncomfortable to not know things. I don’t know WAY more than I do know. And the more I know, the more I know I don’t know.
"Ceremonial purposes" reminds me of a scene in the prehistoric novel 'Reindeer Moon' where three women are embroidering animals on clothes. The first two give elaborate reasons for the animals they chose, something like "Our Clan has the strength of the mighty bear! Our Clan has as many people as feathers on a raven!" etc. The third woman can't come up with a explaination for hers, she just felt like doing a frog that day.
Partner of mine told me about a case where a bunch of old white guys were looking at bones with 28 marks on them, and said "must be ceremonial!" When women finally started getting some representation in the field they just looked at those same (now even older) men and said, "Who counts in 28-day cycles?" The old idiots still didn't get it, but at least everyone else does, now.
I've seen that story repeated a couple of times, and the message is good, but it neglects the fact that people only experience super regular periods when they have healthy reproductive systems and are getting enough to eat. Plus pregnancy and nursing and also being at the beginning and end of your menstruating years also throw off timing.
Reminds me of how teachers always insist that a painting or a poem has a deep meaning while the artist probably was like "damn that's a nice looking sunset imma paint it".
Your example of a toilet seat being interpreted as a ceremonial artifact reminded me of a scene in a French dark comedy reinventing the Arthurian legend (Kaamelott). In the second half of the series, several episodes follow the journey of what is referred to as a crown by the noble who intended to gift it to King Arthur to earn his favor, then by the bandits who stole it from said noble, then by the court who managed to get it back and whose most ambitious knights thought legitimized their position as King Arthur's de facto successor. But when Arthur came back from his soul-searching journey, he crushed all their delusions of grandeur by immediately recognizing it as a simple fruit bowl.
Nothing that you said was wrong in any way but you made me want to rant about this so I will. To be fair, our modern and increasing secular global north society tends to take words like “culture”, “ritual”, and “religion”, and blow their meanings WAY out of proportion. Just because something is ceremonial does not imply that people thought the object channeled crazy supernatural powers or involved extensive cult-like ritual. Sometimes, these terminologies can refer to rituals and ceremonies on a small and personal scale. Bogolanfini textiles made by Malians is an excellent example. In Mali, Bogolanfini may be used to wrap up a mother immediately after giving birth. This is because giving birth is often considered a moment rife with the potential for violence and disaster that puts the mother in danger (just like giving birth anywhere else in the world). But the same patterns may be produced in Mali as souvenirs for tourists. These tourist objects are often mass produced in a factory and may be referred to as Bogolan as opposed to the extensive production process of more ceremonial Bogolanfini, but most agree that they’re very similar end products. Tl;dr: “Ceremonial” doesn’t necessarily imply the opposite of “mundane”.
As someone who makes things, I do love the idea of someone coming across something that I have made without real reason to test a new technique and then someone trying to derive meaning from it. The amount of randomly cut and assembled boards I have is nontrivial and some are finished well enough from testing to last way longer than I will. Sometimes it turns out, people were always people and not everything was made by an ancient people so alien to us that they don't have to entertain bored children or put things together just to see what happens
“This video ends with a stark reminder of the cost of war to not only to the people who lived through it, but to people who lived before and to the knowledge of those who live after.” This hit me hard, because it’s so true.
Fun sidebar: Portuguese sailors also introduced casava root to Taiwan around the same time as Africa, which became a snack in the form of tapioca pearls. This eventually led to, you guessed it, tapioca boba tea!
Man we never just assume stuff is toys. I could fully believe a "man when you touch this thing it makes you feel weird. Cool!" It's always gotta be ritual purposes 😴
Honestly unrelated but thats exactly what people did in england a century or two ago, just touching electruc eels because hey its tingly! (Casualties were many)
Or like it turns out it was just one of those shock-pens in jar-form or something. “Hey man want a sip of muh wine/lemon juice? Fight off scurvy?” “Thoth yeah, brother lemme get that” *zzzzzt*
Thanks algorithm me for bringing me to this channel. Man I love history and ancient conspiracies. This channel has the perfect mix of seriousness/facts and comedy. Love it.
My theory is that someone accidentally shocked themselves with a more primitive setup (i.e. the metals and the acidic solution, without the jar), and then built the assembly in the jar in order to prank their friends with it. ..
Back in the day my friend got free milk bottles (the single serve kind) because they were expired. Tasted one, it was horrendous, and then gave all of us one.
I was wondering about shocks as a possibility. However, nobody would be able to feel 1.1 V with fingers. You can feel 9 V with your tongue but 1.1 V is too little for that too.
A fun idea for the use of the battery in a book would be as a way to safely transport secret documents. If it was opened the wrong way, dropped, or tampered with, the scroll drops into the acid, and no one gets to read it.
lmao, back in the sixties my dad had a boobie trapped book he kept on the dash of his truck. had a gold frame around the edges with a coil attached to a 9 volt battery. the title on the book was "famous nudes of the world", every man or boy that ever got in the truck would try an sneak a peek an get busted when they opened it. dad was a joker.
I like the fact you say that you don't know what item was used for. You are the first one to admit that (on this or many other things) and not try to fill the gap.
"I really am starting to fill the role of the weird substitute teacher" those are the best teachers. Would always learn more from them than the actual teacher.
I had a weird substitute teacher straight up turn into our real teacher after the original lost his credentials. Dude was strange as hell so it turned into a very eventful year. Had a bummer world history teacher for a couple months then BOOM, crazy ass Kendrick Lamar looking dude for the rest of the year. Loved that guy.
The weird thing that i think people don't consider is that one Baghdad jar could have been a single kooky guy's side art project but for some reason it's being extrapolated that multiple people kept that particular combination of jar components
How wonderful it is to discover this already iconic series only 6 episodes in. Added with the genius collaboration with the mixologist, this series is gonna go far. This is gonna get so many people into and excited about archeology
My grandpa used to travel the world as a diplomat during the Cold War, and now whenever he needs a bit of extra cash he gives something to a museum. So selling things to museums is still very much a thing.
Holy hell my heart felt like an anchor as you were talking about the looting of Iraqs national museum. That stuff happens way too often throughout history 😢
Many local people are actually glad that the artifacts are safely in Western museums, instead of being sold to private collectors. That being said, greed, and destruction of context is always bad.
@noneyaratman714 I'm sorry but um it litterally was safe? The thing that changed was that the protectors of the museum had to leave. Riots and looting exist in the western world too. You are litterally the definition of a racist.
I had my high school science teacher use this "battery" as evidence that ancient people were brilliant, and therefore bred dinosaurs as pit fighting animals. That's why they weren't on the Ark: because they weren't made by God, but rather the ancient equivalent of Michael Vick.
@@outdoorscholar6016 Nope. Just a private Seventh Day Adventist place up here in Maine. Wasn't my first choice since I was already very much non-religious at the time.
That one ancient nobleman who was very eccentric and died alone is now laughing as the entire archeology community struggle to figure out what his completely random poetry work was because he incidentally made a battery
Yeah I'm just imagining a guy just gluing a bunch of shit together and someone comes over and he's like "what's that" and he's like "idfk I got all these old pots I'm fucking around with before I dump them off at the river"
As someone with adhd who has made a lot of random useless things in my lifetime, I like to imagine that some of the items found today are simply just an ancient adhd project 😂
@@silhouetted_shadow3486 I preferred mud pies. But I'm happy to say my cooking has drastically improved. It at least is no longer being used to fill holes in driveways.
“It has ritualistic purposes.” -we have no idea what it’s for “It was used in fertility rituals.” -we know exactly what it was used for but we can’t say or our funding will be cut.
Couldn't it have been just some guy in antiquity like trying to invent something? Like people discovered just about every technology with trial and error. Maybe these jars were just some of those errors. Like "I wonder what happens if i stick some copper in this jar while I age some wine" or "I accidentally dropped some metal in my lemon juice and when i grabbed it, I felt a bit wiggly. I wonder if I can do something with that" and it just like didn't work.
That was exactly what I was asking myself! I mean, pretty much all scientific research from all around the world before the modern Era where just some individuals with maybe their own students just doing random things hoping something new might happen. And let's be honest we humanity probably invented the same things hundreds of times until one actually became famous. If only someone way smarter than me could answer this to me
I think that's a pretty poor explanation, because it really isn't one: It's just like ceremonial use - it's an explanation that always works, for every item imaginable. It's possible, and cannot be entirely ruled out obviously. Yet, it does seem unlikely: If it's a one-off prototype/ experimentation thing made by a singular person, it's absurdly unlikely we'd find it. Only a very small percentage of items survive 2000+ years. I feel like the papyrus theory might have some merit. It certainly wouldn't be a method used to store all scripture (metal was expensive), but maybe very important ones like holy texts. Have you ever seen how elaborate torah scroll containers can get with artwork, carvings and precious metals? I could see that.
@@bavarianpotato I agree that it is an explanation that would work for any item and I wouldn't argue strongly that it is definitely what I said, however I disagree with the feeling of how unlikely it is. It seems unlikely that any one invention attempt by a single person would survive for so long. However we know people did try inventing things that didn't work throughout all of time. It's almost like the math problem with the dart board. If you throw a dart with an infinitely small point at a dart board it is guaranteed to hit somewhere, but each infinitely small point on the dart board has a probability of 0% to be hit. It is almost unfathomably unlikely that an individual's failed invention survives for thousands of years and is found. But with how many failed inventions must've been tried and lost to history it is reasonable that we'd find some. Also one caveat that makes this explanation a little more reasonable for this item opposed to others is that they are not found or referenced anywhere else. But in one spot there were several, all with minor differences. Another way it differentiates from the "ceremonial use" argument that I like is that "Ceremonial use" implies the items we found were important. We are just as likely to find stuff that wasn't important to people as we are to find stuff that is. Like if 5000 years in the future one item at my desk right now are found by a future civilization with no context. There is no reason to think they will find my smartphone (Significant to our culture) instead of a random knick knack (Not important). In fact right now I have one smart phone and 4 purposeless knickknacks on my desk. I know I did not argue these things were purposeless knick knacks, but I do think when someone finds ancient artifacts, people want to apply a lot of meaning to them. And a failed invention is an example of something that isn't meaningful
or what if they did have a purpose, it just wasn’t all that useful in the long run? The Greeks had an early prototype of steam engines at least 1000 years before steam power started being thought of, but they didn’t have any use for it so nothing came of it. what if these jars were something similar; a legitimate invention that actually did things, but it didn’t really do anything important so nobody cared
anyone else remember the Mythbusters episode where they tried to figure out wether or not it was actually a battery and somehow ended up making a replica arc of the covenant, hooking a cattle prod up to it, and electrocuting the crap out of adam?
In my first year of my archaeology degree, the professor brought up Motel of Mysteries and showed this exact image! He also made a great point about context using mobile phones. Almost everyone in that lecture theatre had one, but if we all suddenly died and were uncovered 1000s years later, what would our future archaeologists make of these intricately designed blocks of metal and glass? Ritual artifacts? Context is key!
Those phones all get a lot less powerful if the cell network and internet backbones all go down. Most of what we use them for is communicating with services not on the device itself. It's as much an access technology as it is a computational one.
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Oooh ooh i hope ground news considers a newsmax lie to be "just the other side" of a left wing fact based opinion
Hey. It's the guy you quoted.
I feel heard.
Thank you.
Next time ask them for a referral code please! I downloaded the app then deleted the app so I could use your link
I believe you wrote the po box differently switching the 6 and 8 between the chalkboard one and digital one.
You do great work!
To gold plate you only need 3-6v which is possible from 5 or 6 batteries linked in series. However a copper/iron lemon battery will only produce 0.00024 Amps. You need 2-3 Amps for plating. If the battery had a similar output to a lemon battery you'd need around 20,000 batteries in parallel to provide 2.5 Amps. This would only give you 1v. To achieve the 3-6v needed for plating, they would have needed multiple banks of 20k parallel batteries. Meaning anywhere between 60,000 - 120,000 Baghdad batteries to provide 3-6v and 2.5 Amps.
We have a joke in Romania about how advanced were ancient civilizations.
One day, German archeologists found at 5 m deep, some copper wire. They concluded their ancestors, the Goths and Vandals, had some primitive subterranean telephony system.
Not wanted to be under Germans, French archeologists dug at 10 m deep and found some glass remains. They concluded their ancestors, the Celts and Gauls, had optic fiber communication.
Not wanted to be bellow Germans and French, Romanian archeologists, dug to 15 m, nothing, 20 m, still nothing, 30 m nothing yet. They concluded, our ancestors, the Dacians and Gets, had wireless communication.
Lmao nu ma așteptam să găsesc un roman pe aici. Nice one
That’s a great joke but since you said Romania just wanted to say that I’ve just learned of the “Varna culture” of the balkans where they were goldsmithing in 4000bc and they’ve found more gold in one grave there than the rest of the world combined for that time frame.
Brilliant, love it!
I'm sure they did have wireless communication, aka blowing trumpets, pounding on drums or just plain shouting.
@@russlehman2070 lol I even know such a shouting signal system
I'm reminded of the old joke: If an archeologist says something was for used "ritual" or "ceremonial" purposes, they have no fucking idea what it is. Unless they say it was used for "fertility rites", that means they know exactly what it is but don't want to write "Ancient Dildo" in the logs.
Not a joke, but the cold hard truth
Same as field biologists; Specimen released in field- It means you got bitten and dropped the fucker.
Impromtu Disection means you stepped on the critter.
@@Burning_Dwarf If the critter has some kind of fancy crest or some other strange protuberance. It is for sexual selection.
Damnit, I posted the same thing, then saw your post. How dare you! :P
Fuckin' Frances Pryor, man.
...who's joking? That's the truth.
Dodgy archaeology aside, I love the mental image of 200BC silversmithing apprentices daring each other to lick the tingle jar.
Hazing the new guy.
"licking the tingle jar" sounds... very lewd.
"Hormizd, It's time to have a lick on the tingle Jar!"
"Yes, dear..."
New archeological headcannon the Baghdad Batteries were made by ancient frat bros after too much wine
I'd lick the Zap Jar. Sounds kinda fun
If the jar was indeed a “battery”, I can’t imagine it was anything more than a curiosity or party trick made to make people go “huh, that’s kinda neat I guess”
Well that is exactly what Benjamin Franklin did.
Whoops I just got zapped by the jar... let's show this my ancient friends.... places jar in the corner of the room and immediately completely forgetting its purpose... and now the archeology society completley breaks their heads over the use...
@@Flt.Hawkeye That is genuinely my theory on it. Someone tried to store multiple things in 1 jar, got a tingly feeling when he touched it, went “huh that was cool”, and then proceeded to completely forget about it
one volt isn't enough to zap you though. Heck, even a 9-volt battery won't zap you unless you wet your skin or lick it.
@@Mjgaming54321 reminds me of a scene in the book Little Town on the Prairie, where the late-19th century teens are having a birthday party, and the one of them training to be a telegraph operator gets his guests to stand in a line holding hands and gives them a mild shock as a party trick. The author, Laura, is flabbergasted and doesn't even realize what she felt was electricity until the host explained it.
You can tell how much fun this video is gonna be by the number of undone buttons on Milo's shirt. This gonna be awesome!
*bonk*
It’s like a barometer for video interestingness. The less buttons the better. If you ever see a thumbnail with my top button done, don’t even bother.
It has a 90's magician look to it.
@@miniminuteman773 “Shirtless Archeologist rambles about the Rosetta Stone for 45 minutes”
@@miniminuteman773 if you put your hair in a bun would you consider that an extra button?
The papyrus storage device theory actually makes some sense to me. I'm an engineer and one of the things we do with underground piping and electrical wiring is called cathodic protection. It involves inducing a very small electrical current in the soil. Electrons will naturally move in wet soil according to a difference in charges, especially those between a metal and naturally-occurring salts. This movement will corrode most metals over time, and can also accelerate disintegration of organic materials. In cathodic protection we introduce materials (anodes) which the current "prefers" over the piping, so it will corrode those sacrificial anodes rather than your functional equipment.
If this was the idea for these devices, you wouldn't put your papyrus in the same jar as the acid, but rather place a functioning battery device nearby your storage jar to protect it. And a voltage of 1V would probably be enough for that purpose. The setting fits the logic here. But obviously I'm speculating; as you said, without context we will never be sure exactly what these jars were intended to be for or if the inventor even understood what they did. But this hypothesis at least is well established in modern science and engineering.
That is an fascinating take and I had not seen a single other source discuss it like that! So you think the battery could have actually been a part of the storage unit that helped preserve the papyrus? That is a really interesting interpretation and seems very logical. I wonder why we don't see technology like this for storage in other places. Perhaps the climate here called for it or it was stored in a damp environment.
@@miniminuteman773 Cathodic protection is pretty common where you have underground systems that pose a big problem if they fail and that are intended to last more than 20 years (e.g. oil pipelines, hazardous chemical supplies, marine docks). The principle's been around since the 1820s but the technology has only been in common use since the 1920s. Since it requires regular maintenance and costs to design and install, it's not used for most low-risk situations.
As for why we don't see it archaeologically... it's certainly possible the galvanic reaction was observed by one person in particular but since the technology wasn't there to understand it, it never came into common use. Plus, since the 'battery' has to be 'recharged' frequently it might simply have taken too much effort to be worth it. Again, ALL speculation here.
But it is the standard design for tanked water heaters... You probably have one in yours and weren't even aware! 😉
@@CaelanAegana but wouldn't that still require the papyrus to be submerged in an electrolyte solution? If it's sealed in a separate jar, there's no pathway for the electron flow to include the papyrus. So far as I know, the longest surviving examples of papyrus have come from arid environments
@@jawsbert it's honestly a best guess given what little is known about these things. If (BIG IF) that was what they were trying to do, they almost certainly didn't fully grasp why it worked. But no, there wouldn't need to be solution in the papyrus jar, because the Cathodic protection would have been applicable to the jar's exterior (specifically the iron bit), to keep it from deteriorating and letting water inside. No contact with water = preserved papyrus.
@@CaelanAegana ah, okay. I assumed when you said it could accelerate the deterioration of organic materials that we were talking about protecting the papyrus directly, rather than protecting the container. Thanks for the clarification
Hi! Physicist with chemistry experience here! One thing I’d like to say is that I have no problem believing that ancient cultures made things that fit our current definition of “battery” just by chance. I’d actually be genuinely shocked if accidental “batteries” weren’t somewhat of a common occurrence. The question is what was it USED for? A battery is something that uses a chemical reaction to get charged particles moving. A “battery” in and of itself isn’t that special: two types of metal which act as “opposites” in terms of how well they want to grab electrons and a medium for them to travel through is it! The context that matters here, is that finding a “battery”, no matter how well it works, is almost certainly meaningless without a circuit.
I remember early batteries were used to make animal muscles twitch. It could have just been a "neat trick" people were doing in the kitchen.
_"Current_ definition of 'battery'."
I see what you did, there!
and I mean, when your cathode is a copper tube, your anode is an iron rod, and your electrolyte is just a bath of lemon juice, it doesn't exactly make a very good battery, and I'm pretty sure it won't power any alien device, make a led light up maybe, but it won't send you to space. that is why some people proposed that it was used for some kind of galvanization processes that was discovered by accident, but I'm not sure that is how galvanization works, unless what you are trying to galvanize are the iron rods, and we would have found evidence of galvanized metals.
as a historian - I am reminded about the stories of Ben Franklin and his batteries - he would hook them up to play pranks on his friends and enemies... and to watch frog twitch under an electric probe.
@@keithlarsen7557 hey look at me reactivating the nerves of a dead creature for my entertainment, we have truly forsaken God/j
It's so sad the Egyptians had lightbulbs and the Iraqis had power, but they never met to combine them. Imagine how much more advanced we would be if they'd had that chocolate-peanut butter moment!
the trade networks went through the mountains in palistein the trade networks were huge, and the whole point of the video is NO THEY DIDN"T
@@yvonnethompson844 The comment above yours was sarcasm, believe it or not.
@@ambannedfrombeinghuman2263 and you, didn't need to correct anything. Grow up.
@@yvonnethompson844 ??? And my comment wasn't meant to be an insult believe it or not.
You're probably the type that has a lack of understanding regarding tonal changes and social ques, you need to grow up too. You can't make any meaningful connections if you don't even know how tones and social ques work.
@@yvonnethompson844 damn what's up your ass?
I just had a realization: this could be a fermentation crock. Vinegar is a fermented food after all. The copper and metal part be used to keep plant matter submergered, or as a gas valve. Those metals might have been used because they could be sterilized easily, or because they would react to the vinegar when it was ready, acting as an indicator the vinegar was ready. After vinegar is done fermenting, it’s sealed up to keep it fresh until it’s ready for use. The papyrus might have been used as a permeable cover to keep dust out without blocking air from the culture (or as a label, or to pull out a bit of the vinegar to test its taste)
This is the theory I was waiting to be explored as well! The moment I heard wine and vinegar I was like, "Oh! So fermentation..." Maybe we'll get a part 2 lol
That is the most convincing theory I've heard about the thing.
Ok, you sold me
As someone that makes wine and vinegar, yeah that sounds about right~
Adding to that copper is also a fungicide and reacting with the acid would dissolve it into the liquid and the food. Its not exactly healthy but then romans were eating from lead plates hundreds of years later and even modern humans use tons of toxic materials because of convenience or because the long term effects werent known like asbestos or plastic softeners
It's an ancient paper shredder. When the ancient FBI was coming for ancient Enron, they dumped out their pots, filled them with acid, and started destroying the papyrus trail.
I know you meant it as a joke, but I kind of wonder if it was something along those lines. An elaborate, ceremonial (😋 I know, I know), definite way to destroy a papyrus in this world and the next. I wonder if they DID put a papyrus in the jar with acid, maybe it was a curse or a broken oath or treaty or something. An acid paper shredder that might give someone a little zappy zap if they picked it up and tried to open it. Like if simply burning the scroll wasn't enough and you just wanted a little something *extra* so that even the gods couldn't read it (burnt offerings went right up to the gods, after all).
@@octoscorpion2506 probably wasn't, judging that no acid they had would be strong enough to damage the cellulose the papyrus is primarily made up of. Heck, few acids WE have would do it. Cellulose is tough stuff, that's why trees use it.
Papyrus trail. 👌
@@blakksheep736 Them dang trees usin up all the cellulose like that
Ammonia or bleach would do a better job of that than acid. Bases are much more destructive to organic matter than acids, in general. And ammonia is easily acquired from urine, so frankly it’s more likely that they just had stale urine on hand for its many varied uses than some chemically useful acid, the most likely sources for which would be fruit juice or vomit. Not exactly likely that they’d intentionally vomit to acquire hydrochloric acid, either. So it’s really just fruit, which likely wasn’t very powerful acid, and certainly wasn’t strong enough to break down cellulose, or the fruits would dissolve themselves.
I love he introduced a drink gimmick and then proceeded to not make another epsiode for at least a year
He had some drinkin' to do.🍻
The demon drink...
Probably that allergy
He's fiiiiiiine.
It took him a while to come up with another drink.
To be fair..."All Aperture Science personality constructs will remain functional in apocalyptic, low power environments of as few as 1.1 volts."
haha, yes! another personal that recognized "1.1 volts"
Was looking for someone to say this
When you started saying "Why don't we just study the artifact", my original thought was that it was lost during world war 2. It really caught me off guard when you said how recent the loss really was.
And remember! The invasion of Iraq was based on a lie! Even better!
Fuckin George W Bush, man...
@@z-beeblebrox and tony blair, jon howard, etc. bush wasn't the only western leader to go all in back then...
@@ThePoohat he was the only one to go because of end of the world Evangelical lunacy.
@@carlost856 what? He did it for imperialism
Most of the time people try to eliminate echo in videos but it honestly just makes this feel more like a classroom
Lol this is such a back handed complement.
I never really noticed this - but u really like the echo too!! Thanks for pointing it out xD
In sound editing you can always add echos via sfx but you can't remove them
@@StevenZephycBut we can nowadays. Even live in calls.
Biology:
"What's that for"
"Dunno...mating display?"
"Of course!"
Archeology:
"What's this for?
"Dunno..religious ceremony?"
"of course!"
Ahhhh, science
exception is birds, those guys making human courting look easy
Physics:
“What causes that”
“Dunno... dark matter?”
“Wow, so cool”
Anthropology
"Why do they do that?"
"Dunno...for sex?"
"Of Course!"
Conspiracy theories:
"What is this thing?"
"Dunno... aliens or illuminati?"
"Why not both?"
Psychology:
"Why do we do x"
"Dunno...youre probably mentally unwell?"
"Yea, that makes sense."
This is what I love about discussing sciences. Sometimes you get things wrong, and this kind of civil discourse is soooo refreshing. Thank you for showing this and talking about it!
Just watched part 2 thought I was there lol
"is it racist to be loved?" has to seriously be the greatest line I have ever heard. Milo's supposed wife is the MVP of this video 😂😂
Well, is it?
@@alastorlapid2365 No, it's just the natural order of things.
@@SerialElfYT xenophobia is natural, racism can only exist with an understanding of what races are which people wouldn't, if they hadn't been taught by racists.
@@SineN0mine3 Did you even read what I replied too? The originating quest was "Is it racist to be loved?"
I'm sure it was making the connection from "someone who is woke to racism is also woke to sexism and it's sexist to have a woman make you something for related".
Not that that is any more thought through given how the interaction went and how he's carrying himself in all his videos.
the ceremonial issue reminds me of the fact that a lot of ancient houses in scotland open to the east, with some historians linking this to a worship of the rising sun (to be fair, there is a lot of east-west burials so there is some evidence) - ignoring the fact that we're a rainy island facing the atlantic and that most of the wind and the rain would have come from the west, something you wouldn't really want your entry facing
Praise the sun tho! Am I right??🤣🤣🤦♂️
Exactly
Both could be true, but I find that ceremony follows practicality. As in something that we do as a ceremonial thing had a far simpler and purely practical purpose at one point that led to the addition of the ceremonial aspects.
I also don't like the fact that we always chalk stuff up to religious purpose, like, maybe humans just like being bathed by sunlight when they start their day... We have a lot of costumes that are present for long periods of time that have more to do with broader cultural identity than with just religious.
this reminds me of a funny thing i saw like this once, where there was some sort of ancient homes being studied. they kept finding them to frequently have knives tucked away on top of beams that supported the framework of the house, way up high at the ceiling. they wondered what it could mean, debated if it was a religious tradition, what the symbolism could represent, and so on until one of them realized "oh, duh. they had kids. they didn't want children to get into the knives so theyd keep them out of reach."
I think something that gets overlooked by archaelogists is that sometimes, artifacts could be one off experiments. The Bagdad Battery could have legitimately been an experiment with electricity that, for one reason or another, was abandoned. We usually want to assume that things survive history because they worked, or were significant. But sometimes things just survive. Just a thought.
And also another thought:
Those experiments estimated the output of a theoretical battery with local materials around 1V. Let's imagine old folks were really efficient and used nice metals and concentrated acids. Let's give them 300% efficiency, and say the battery has 3V.
How would you detect 3V? We have amazing led lights capable of working of 1V, but how would you, as a normal person, detect 3V?
1V is barely detectable by a tongue. It feels slightly sour, because "sour-ness" is just our brains interpreting free available protons in acids / from current. 3V is noticeably sour, but you've just poured real acid into the battery, it wouldn't feel strange.
So how would you demonstrate this to someone for any purpose, let alone use it?
Yeah, its like, people forget that in history inventors like Hero existed, who just used their time and money to invent things more to prove they could than because they were going to change the world with practical applications (He invented a very rudimentary rotary steam engine and proved you could get useful work out of steam, then moved on to other projects and his mathematics)
i would post that except where is the documentation of any experimenter
@@Dorsidwarf the aeolipile. Hero (or Heron) invented it as a toy. He invented a whole bunch of impressive things, not all for toys, including the first coin operated vending machine. Not devised by Hero, but another example of a seeming one off, and probably the best example because the technology seems far ahead of other things at the time is the Antikythera mechanism. It's apparently not all that technologically advanced for the day or even all that hard to make, but the concept/design was far more complex than anything else found at that time.
If you presented these things to me out of context (as in, tiny jars, one with papyrus in it, one with traces of acid, and with a tube/cylinder combo that fit into each other), my first guess wouldn't have been "battery", but "some kind of tool for secret correspondence".
Roll the papyrus around the cylinder, put it into the sealed tube, and immerse it into a jar full of acid, then seal it before sending it. At this point the only way to safely unseal the message is by breaking the jar itself, as if you tried to get the tube out first, the acid gets to the papyrus, and by the time you unroll it from the cylinder, the message is destroyed. This way nobody could sneakily open the message on the way to its destination and then re-seal it, making it a counter-espionage tool, and there are no records of this, because it was a state secret and/or only used in a limited fashion or a short time.
Now, I'm not saying that the jars were used this way, I'm just trying to illustrate that there's a lot of potential alternative utilities between "it's ancient high tech" and "it's ceremonial".
I like how if future archaeologists dug through the landfill of a small town there would be zillions of alkaline batteries and light bulbs, because when a society uses technology like that it actually /uses/ it.
The fact that there’s just one “battery” and one carving of a light bulb shows it wasn’t actually electricity or electric lights.
"How'd they do it in total darkness?!?" So I guess people back then knew how to create giant light bulbs and electricity to power them but fire is a fringe concept.
There’s no soot on the ceiling is what they’re talking about. They used a clean burning oil, is the explanation why
@@eugenideddis Right? Oil lamps are quite literally the most stereotypical Middle Eastern object.
Also, I imagine wood isn't something that's plentiful in Mesopotamia and the Levant. So wood are reserved for making building frames, weapons (spear shaft, arrows, etc) and Fuel for high intensity heat (cooking, furnaces) than to use them for light
how did the workers in the inner chambers of the pyramids see in there while carving stone for hours on end? theres not enough ventilation to light fires in there you will suffocate before long
@@pilot.wav_theory The Pyramids ain't built from up to bottom... It's built from the Bottom up... You know, like any buildings built on this planet ever?
So, by this very BASIC logic, the inner chamber walls were built and carved before the "roof" (the tip of the Pyramid) and ceilings are set... That means the ceilings are not there yet, so you can work by using, you guess it... Sunlight, Woahhh! Mind blown 🤯🤯
I know right? Really Amazing groundbreaking stuff that took a lot of brain power to think about
@@pilot.wav_theory A few actual facts:
-Never once, not in any capacity, has the remnant or mention of anything electrical ever been described in the times of which the pyramids were built. Not one single piece of supporting theory, not a scrap material goods.
-The only thing anybody has to go on is the aforementioned artifact of which dates to a different time period in a far away region.
-The drawing in the temple literally describe what they are. There's absolutely no confusion on what they represent.
As noted in the video and elsewhere, the temple carvings were likely done before they roof was put on, providing ample light. each chamber in the pyramids would have had a ton of time before they were covered in which they could have been carved. And even so, oil lamps won't burn up all of the O2 in the chambers. They were not sealed off to the outside world until everything was done.
One other thing: Unless they had some kind of hyper efficient filament technology, they weren't going to be producing much light at all. As such those batteries wouldn't have enough capacity to last very long. So there'd be massive caches of spent batteries laying around.
I think some ancient guy made these as a startup and pitched them to the ancient middle eastern version of Shark Tank. But then ancient Mark Cuban pointed out that there wasn't anything for the batteries to do because light bulbs wouldn't be invented for over a thousand years. And that's why there's only 4.
Frankly I think you've solved it
If only they'd consulted with the Egyptians.
But.... but... electroplating!
No point in inventing a can opener until the can has first been invented, yes.
*Sheik Tank
Considering we've only found a few of these in the same remote region, it's possible that this was a singular discovery by one person and he never revealed it to anyone. Maybe he actually did accidently figure out how to plate something, or just thought the shock was cool, but either it didn't fully work or he died shortly after and they just sat there doing nothing for the rest of time.
I think "eccentric guy throwing stuff together to see what will happen" is something we don't consider enough with these types of things.
I mean... that's pretty much how a lot of stuff was discovered. Granted the people had some scientific knowledge about how stuff works but by and large it was typically some dude just trying a lot of stuff out.
I imagine that guy was the StyroPyro of his time
It would explain why each are different, experimentation.
It's like the "words of unknown origin" that seem to my ear to be like the kind of words I'd make up one day if I wanted a cutesy- or silly-sounding or "ad hoc" word. It's almost like we somehow think only contemporary people could be unserious. What the hell?
This could be very true
The Motel of the Mysteries plug literally made me gasp - I read that book once as a kid and I've thought about it roughly once a year since then but I've never been able to find it!
The battery as a battery could have been a novelty for the rich. “ Ooh it gives me the tingles.” And by sheer chance it survived.
That WAS the original use for batteries in the 1700's.
@@Sorenzo w h a t
yea, sometimes Humans just make shit they think is cool.
i vote for ancient sex toy.
At 1.1 volts, you wouldn't even feel it.
Man, that museum story gets me. We still periodically find stuff the Nazis hid that we didn't even know went missing. We'll be finding artifacts from that museum for decades
You wanna feel sad, it was the Americans that did the looting.
Yeah, like, during WW2 we lost the most complete spinosaurus skeleton we have yet found.
Anything remaining is likely in a collection of sorts as the Nazi's were selling a lot of it off for profit. A good large portion of it definitely made its way to Russia and the US though.
@@josephpowell2850 im am pretty sure that the museum that had that spinosaurus was completely obliterated during a british firebombing air raid. we will never get those particular fossils back. 😥
There's loads of stuff in museums around the world that is in desperate need of documentation and additional preservation efforts, but for various reasons these archives continue to be neglected. And then there's all the shit that various people, most notoriously the nazis, hid away. Who knows when that stuff will all be found.
The Baghdad battery wasn’t used for a light! That’s just ridiculous! That carving wasn’t a lightbulb.
It was their highly advanced snake launcher, which they used to fight off the ancient aliens. The Baghdad battery only put out one volt because that’s all it needed. They were that advanced.
The Pharoh's AA gun
@@captainducktape689 The wrath of Ra
@@WolframTitanite *something something* landing pads *something something* Stargate
Well look at portal 2 the whole compund thing runs off 1 volt
So it wasn’t a battery but a battery!
I love how Milo has, at the same time, all the chill and no chill. Makes me wish I had history teachers this cool when I went to school…
Hearing about all the missing and broken artifacts genuinely tore at my heart- at least some were returned but centuries of history just being lost like that just hurts, especially after hearing how much the staff desperately tried to protect them in the first place
I teared up. Like heck, thanks for the feels Milo
Personally I'm a lot more bothered about the half a million innocent civilians the US military killed during that war by using "scorched earth" tactics (which, if you don't know, means destroying all food and water sources within an area to starve their enemies...also every other person in the area who doesn't evacuate).
@@WildBluntHickok The US didn't do that. The deaths did happened, but that wasn't how.
@@WildBluntHickok hey dude did you know two things can upset a person. In fact, many things can. People don't have one single thing that upsets them.
That's not what we're talking about right now. This is a video about archaeology lmao
I literally cried. Just... why.
A detail you didn't mention: The clips with people demonstrating these “working replicas” invariably use a single LED. That's a completely different technology from an incandescent light bulb. Even a light bulb dimensioned for flashlights draws several orders of magnitude more power than an LED to even begin to glow. So these “working replicas” are, in fact, not working.
what do you mean, what about those ancient silicon semiconductor forges we dug up!? :D
Yeah, I just keep thinking how dull an incandescent lightbulb is, and we have to use a vacuum to keep those running for more than a few seconds.
You obviously haven't heard of the Baghdad Light Emitting Diode...
you're just going to pretend that the _Tigris Transformer_ doesn't exist?!
@@jaewok5G and Babylon Railgun ;)
The dry-humor no-bullshit tone of this channel is extremely refreshing. As someone who grew up watching the History/Discover channels before they declined, I sorely miss genuinely educational and entertaining history programs. This channel is definitely scratching that itch.
As a child of the eighties, I cut my teeth watching "In Search Of..." ("Great Mysteries Of The World" here in Australia) Sunday afternoons and spent 1981 to 1988 learning about 'Ancient Egypt' from primary school until the end of junior high school. When I had the choice to study ancient or modern history in senior high school, you know what I chose. Another year of Egypt and a some fun outside reading of magazines like Fortean Times lead me to very interesting conversations with one of the kids who could keep up with me in maths class (apparently I was a disruptive student and was not allowed to take chemistry in senior high for some of the stuff I did in physic involving firecrackers in yr 10). One of the discussions was Egyptian jar batteries. For some reason, I remember these being reported as being found in 'the pyramids' and were copper and zinc rods sitting in large jars along the halls of various Egyptian site. Of course there was no other mention of them outside of the magazine (what I considered at the time a wonderful monthly allminnack of insanity that made for great party conversations) and my ancient history teacher dismissed as rubbish (and told me to keep smoking pot as it means one less kid to teach), but yeah, there is somewhere some assertion the the Egyptians of the first kingdom had electric batteries!
On a related topic, I have taken to telling cold-calling solar panel sales people that I am Ra and that they are stealing my energy, and that they own me millions in unpaid rates. This tends to work most of the time in the "you hang up, no you hang up" game but I did get one guy who lost his shit at me for saying I am god and I did have to hang up first :(
The description of the "batteries" got me thinking, as painter it's common to store brushes only used for thinner based paint in paint thinner as cleaning them is more effort than it's worth. Just imagine some guy in 2000 years digging up a shed and finding a sealed jar with a brush and paint thinner inside and everyone starts speculating what kind of highly advanced apperatus they found.
huh... good point. everyone fixed on asphault since it's an insulator but it's probably just an ordinary damned lid. And asphault would be good (er) at keeping stuff in than most ancient alternatives.
Let's not forget the 'Buddhas of Bamiyan' being blown up. That was a cultural crime that infuriates me to this day.
Yes, the tragic case of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, whose destruction was ordered by the Taliban in 2001, shows intriguing similarities with the destruction of Artemis Temple: the eradication of a monument, sacred as well as emblematic and belonging to the cultural heritage.
I had a similar thought as well.
“What if these jars that have nothing in common are filled with different things…were just jars used for storage ?”
I paint as well as do miniatures and 3d printing and have about 20 different containers full of things ranging from chemicals, brushes, tools and such. I don’t finding hard to believe someone else in ancient history may have needed storage solutions for their hobby or profession.
Yeah, despite it being able to generate an electric current, nobody is willing to theorize its purpose assuming that property is coincidental. Perhaps it was just acid.
It all started with one unhinged man, now it's a complete team with a researchist, an editor and a mixologist? Damn, I can't wait to see what this channel will become in a couple of years xD
One massive university party
I anticipate a completely chaotic hand puppet.
And a blacksmith 🙊
We already have "Drunk History." Is the world ready for "Drunk Archaeology?"
That bit at the end about the National Museum of Iraq genuinely turns my stomach. I don't know how I was never aware of it before, but seeing those smashed cases and things is unbelieveably upsetting to me. Thousands of irreplaceable artifacts, the stories and traces of millions upon millions of human beings who once lived and died, stolen for profit or perhaps destroyed. Horrible.
Honestly, if you think that is upsetting, then your not gonna like what we did to the middle east in general....
Baghdad was a major thriving city, and had nothing to do with the terrorists that came to america in 2001. but, the US didn't care, we bombed that city, and its never been the same.
We DESTROYED an entire city, filled with millions of people, people that had wives, husbands, daughters, sons, grandparents, markets, schools, churches, etc. outright KILLING entire families, wiping out generations of people. we committed genocide after genocide....just because we had an inkling that they had something to do with the terrorists.
Ancient knowledge and education is nice, but honestly i think modern day people, people who have lives RIGHT NOW, are a bit more important.
And don't get me wrong, this looting of artifacts, which as you said, were "the stories and traces of millions upon millions of human beings who once lived and died" is a MAJOR TRAGEDY by itself. We might not ever find the stories of many of those people ever again. Those people are now lost to the ever present thing of time, just because of someones stupid desire for war and bloodshed.
Michael Moors documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 )ii think it was that one anyway) includes scenes from the bombing of Baghdad, and how the civilians who lived there reacted, and how they suffered because of that bombing.
(i upvoted your comment too, FYI, it deserves to be seen, read, and understood)
@@alericjohansen6775 I don't disagree with your comment at all, what the U.S./Coalition forces did was an atrocity that continues to ruin peoples lives to this day. But I do hate that it's impossible to make a comment like the one I left without someone jumping on and giving the "but what about..." comment. Just because I didn't explicitly mention something doesn't mean I am not aware of it and angry about it.
Sorry, I still don't disagree with you at all here, I just really don't like how people online seem to expect that every comment must address every aspect of a situation. It makes discussion impossible because every comment would need to be a 25 page essay just to meet everyones standard.
(I think this comment comes off more hostile than I intended. I'm not mad at you or anything here, your comment is accurate and perfectly reasonable. This is just the bit my brain got stuck on this morning)
@@WarningPuzzle
True, your comment can come off as hostile (i didn't read the 1st part as that hostile, more just making some good arguments, but the 2nd part did make it clear you werent trying to be), but technically mine can too. But, i think its hard to hit on such a subject without invoking someones anger/rage, so its to be expected.
You are right though, trying to meet the standards of everyone WOULD mean a 25 page essay (or longer, as the history of things can get quite complicated).
And your also right, just because you didn't explicitly say some other aspect, doesn't mean you aren't aware of it and angry about it.
Im glad that you are aware of that stuff. Too many people that I talk to/argue with online don't even seem to care.
Too often i see people not even care that people are suffering. And WAY too often i see people take GLEE in the suffering of others.
Different experiences between us I guess.
It still somehow shocks me that people can't mourn the permanent loss of ancient history, through the destruction of incomprehensibly priceless and unique artifacts that through unbelievable odds survived millennia, without knuckle-dragging, mouth breathing morons screaming about sADdaM hOOSaiN blah blah weapons of maSs DesTrUCtiOn, OORAH, every five fucking minutes.
Think of all the people exploited just to obtain these artifacts.
If the Parthians did use the Bagdad battery for material plating it was probably for galvanization not gold plating. Yes this requires zinc, but Zinc was commonly traded in the Mediterranean at the time (the Romans used it to make Brass). Galvanizing can be done with low voltages (it just takes longer), yet galvanizing tools makes them last longer before rusting. A galvanized tool will not rust until the entire galvanization layer has broken down, after which it will start to rust normal, but the break down of the galvanized layer would explain would explain why no examples of galvanized tools can be found as the galvanized layer would have already broken down completely.
not to mention that, being batteries, they can be connected in series to up the voltage. To me that was the largest oversight in this video, even if it doesn't necessarily change the conclusion.
honestly this is the most believable theory to me other than "some guy was just messing around with some pots and stuff". ancient people were really resourceful and i wouldn't be surprised if someone out there figured this out just by accident
@@AlexCauthon This is how it works in theory yes, but the important thing to remember is that voltage is only one aspect of electricity. The problem is that the connectors, the very wires themselves which allow you to put things in series, have their own resistances and impedences, and a capacitive effect with other wires in a circuit. Connecting batteries in series isn't a linear relationship, as at these ultra-low voltages, just making the cable too long would incur an unsustainable loss of current through resistance. Even if you could get dozens of these batteries linked in series, you would still be dealing with extremely low current as well, and you would need quite an extreme number to do any meaningful work (and learning how to make components which require electricity to work is a very different problem than getting the electricity in the first place)
All of this to say that if ancient scholars were indeed aware of the properties of this battery, they would have quickly realized that this is a very inefficient way to do this. If they had the knowledge of electricity, they would have found a better power source that scales more appropriately, and if they didn't have this knowledge then this most likely isn't a battery.
“I don’t know” is the most honest and powerful statement a researcher can make.
It's certainly better than "people say", or "looks like". I also feel like some of these shows want us to believe that the word "possible" means "probable".
"I don't know" is an answer which isn't allowed in most of academia. It's also dismissed by things as simple as pride.
@@JtRiddell "We don't know" actually comes up *constantly* in academia. Not in undergrad, in actual Research work.
@@Michael-bn1oi ok, caveats exist. Thank you for covering my blindness, but only in actual research work. If you're the student and trying to pass your midterm or write your thesis, you are very much expected to know.
But, therein draws the line of what's necessary or superfluous, right?
I imagine someone saying this, then turning to look out of the window of the old Land Rover that they're riding in and observing the vast desert landscape outside. "But there's a lot of un-dug desert out there" followed by heavy breathing as he clutches a spade and trowel.
At some level, I have to wonder if either: A. these were a one off experiment by someone living in antiquity that just happened to notice that putting copper and iron in acid got him mildly zapped, and then made a couple more to try to figure out why, and when he died, got buried with them because no one else ended up caring about it, or B. Someone in the 1930s found tiny clay jars and had an idea. It wouldn't be the first time someone from the dark ages of archaeology decided that fame and fortune was more important than history.
That B part could be true but I slightly have some doubt on it ... I read that the claim by Wilhelm König that the jars dated on Parthian era could be a misnomer, and has been said that the style matches that of the Sassanids era, the Era succeeded them.
I hope they did a C-14 dating on it before the Iraqi war happened cause I can't find that information as a Layman... Because it's really hard to fake a Radicarbon dating... I guess not impossible, but really not worth the hassle
My thoughts on the entire theory. It proves they COULD HAVE, made batteries. But NOT if they did. Fact is we know they chose not to. But everything needed to make a battery was right there. Adam Savage agrees with this. They had the ingredients but for whatever reason they chose not to. Bonus fact: it would be about as good as a cheepo modern AA.
Yah. If this is really a battery it was likely a situation similar to heros engine. The ancient Greco-Egyptian steam engine that was pretty much just a toy without practical use.
@@amberfarmer2869 Thank you for bringing this point up, it's what I tend to think.
Fancy alcohol mixer...
This man is so educational and he has the aesthetic sensibilities of a gay pirate. Truly an icon.
Most pirates were gay.... what else are 50+ guys gonna do stuck out at sea?
Soo.... a pirate? lol
@@simonhandy962 mermaids, according to Columbus the Manatee Boinker.
@@lordfelidae4505love the word boinker lmao
Butt pirate? That is a great shirt.
In the manufacture of gas dispensers (or pumps), one task is to peel the backing material off of adhesive vinal graphics and stick them onto the plastic pump doors. A tool we used for this is a 3M deflater tool. Basically an ink pen like device with a needle, that comes out and retracts. At a cost of around $35 each.
Wanting one of my own, I made one from a ball point ink pen, a copper or brass tube, and a stainless steel sewing needle to replace the ball point pen's ink barrel.
To solder the stainless steel needle into the brass or copper tube, required that I electroplate it with copper first.
A plastic container, a bit of copper wire as my source of copper, And a liquid copper sulfate solution obtained from an aquarium supply store mixed with salt water And a used AC to DC wall wart, allowed this.
The small AC to DC power converter was 6 volts, And it allowed me to copper plate the needle and solder it securely into the tube. The voltage and amperage determined the time required to coat the stainless steel with copper electro plating. 6 volts took about 15 minutes.
6 volts @ 200 mA I considered the maximum save DC voltage I considered for doing this electroplating experiment, it could have been less and just taken longer. There are other chemical mixtures that will also do this.
As a builder of antennas, I still hold this copper plating method in reserve for soldering dis-similar metals together. I am not an academic, I as a mechanic and electrician, simply made things work.
Imagine being 6 episodes into the best idea for a series ever and it being so radically different, better, and more chaotic than the first. I love this series and I love that shirt and want to steal it.
Milo is becoming more unhinged as this series progresses.
Can’t wait to see how manic they will be at the end of the series
Pretty sure this is just so they can survive with their insanity intact.
And that's a good thing. 😀
It comes with the territory of science and archeology in general
Never met any archeologist that isn't absolutely unhijnged or are the guy who opened the first jurassic park
I appreciate your conclusion after shooting holes in all the theories by admitting that you honestly have no idea what it was for. "I don't know" is a perfectly valid response that many many people are afraid to say.
It’s also even more stupid than calling it what it is. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. What would be so catastrophic about ancient civilizations utilizing batteries in one single country on the earth?
@@ghost-user559 -- If they were useful, we'd see more of them. Since this is the only observed instance, they were either bad at their intended purpose, a novelty that didn't catch on, or a secret that wasn't revealed.
Maybe it was a battery, but that wouldn't mean a whole country was using electrical equipment, just one guy or maybe one village. If we knew where it came from, we could learn so much more, but we do know that nobody at the time cared.
@@TlalocTemporal I find that to be an utterly ridiculous conclusion. Tell me oh great genius, would there be any recorded trace of a SINGLE thing we have said or done online, including this conversation, if something as simple as the server hard discs at google were buried in a mudflow, or we failed to retain the ability to generate power after some worldwide cataclysm?
Would there be a single record of anything stored digitally if something as simple as an extraordinary solar flare blanketed the earth? And you act as if an instruction manual would be readily available thousands of years later?
You act as if simply because YOU say so, that everything must be neatly discoverable millennia later. How many millions of urns and how many TONS of pottery have been discovered and “cleaned” or outright discarded in the past several THOUSAND years?
Would a museum prior to this century even have the slightest idea to test specifically for ph before cleaning? Would such a discovery have even been noticed before WE had electricity?
A kindergardener can light up a series of lightbulbs with a POTATO. I hardly think that in all of human history and throughout all spans of every civilization we only just discovered either electricity or its uses.
But again what makes you think any such record of such a thing would ever be discerned by us, if this conversation itself most certainly would not exist in any tangible form, nor would the sum total of modern human progress, if we simply unplugged the mainframe our conversation resides upon as we speak?
Only fools (archeologists and scholars) are under some narcissistic delusions that if they personally did not discover something that is does not exist. Because we don’t write in stone any longer as citizens, hardly a single recorded thing our entire civilization has done or said would so much as survive a power outage, much less “leave records” in any single tangible medium.
What makes you think that tiny clay and presumably disposable jars would leave a single trace of their purpose outside of a highly preserved environment. There are MANY worldwide inventions from many civilizations and tribes which we retain merely one example of common items during their era, one single knife or some idol or trinket which is the only evidence we have for “how they lived” in that entire epoch of humanity? And yet you see no issues with extrapolation in those instances which have less physical evidence than this? If we consider batteries consumables to this day, and expensive for special purposes, why would they not be disposable and expensive then?
There are images all over the earth of various “magical” devices. People with “glowing halos” or “glowing faces” or “glowing auras”, and history is full of examples of alchemists and emperors scheming up advancements in technology. What would arc lighting or some amateur filament look like to an outsider besides magic? I have no doubt that MANY such people invented MANY ways of utilizing electricity. It’s utterly ridiculous to assume otherwise simply because we had no idea to properly LOOK for such evidence.
@@ghost-user559 -- CDs have binary data etched directly into metal foil. Just one disc in a swamp would preserve that quite well. Modern computers have many examples of intricate manufacturing and using electricity for logical computing protected inside heat-resistant inert plastic cases, surrounded by metal.
Even if all the paper records were destroyed and all the magnetic tapes and flash memory were wiped in a massive solar storm, any mildly preserved electronic device would display a deep understanding of electrical handling, petrochemicals, data manipulation, material science, and quite possibly consumerism.
Many servers still use hard disc drives for their reliability, so there's a not insignificant chance of some server somewhere keeping a copy of this conversation etched in metal buried in mud somewhere. Decoding all the data formats would be a monumetal task though.
Most importantly, there are trillions of smart electronic devices. You can't hardy go anywhere on land that doesn't have a hundred CPUs within as many miles. There's billions if not trillions of miles of copper cable lining almost every dwelling on the planet. We've made so much stuff that getting rid of it is a gobal issue.
There's exactly zero chance that we leave no trace of having electrical, informational, and spaceflight tech if we were wiped out today. Fusion tests, direct genetic manipulation, machine learning and AI; these are all rare enough to possibly be missed for a long time or be lost, but even things like fission power and weapons, prosthetics, and quantum tech is far to widespread to just be missed.
If even one city was using electricity even semi-commonly, we should see hundreds of these pots, all with a similar metal insert with a single rod out the top. Yet we see only one instance. Perhaps one king had a wonderous firestarter, or a few alchemists were messing around with oxidation, but there was certainly no industry around producing electrical cells for lighting or refining metal with chemistry.
At best, we find a previously unmentioned and undiscovered city that has hundreds of there, along with the equipment for utilizing them, and was somehow lost to time, taking their knowledge with them. Until that discovery happens though, there is less than zero evidence for any significant usage of whatever these pots with metal inserts were.
@@TlalocTemporal Most of that copper from those wires would become simple deposits given enough time. And magnetic discs are utterly worthless for 99% of humanity, can you even fabricate any single component of a silicon wafer? Much less reinvent optical drives, motherboards, capacitors, and all of the software and infrastructure required to even BOOT a computer, much less READ a disc? Not a chance.
Or much less compile CODE without any idea what the functionality of such a disc even is?
Bullets do you no good if you have no concept of a rifle or any knowledge of gunpowder. It’s a shiny hunk of brass to the unenlightened. How many millennia did it take to solve something as simple as basic hygiene and plumbing?
You severely underestimate historical catastrophe and its effects upon the earth. One single carrington event, a single or series of Chicxulub type impacts, or even a sizable seismic cascade or a fault line slip with mega tsunamis is adequate to destroy access to all of the servers in North America. Any one event could do so. Not to mention something as simple as a single super volcano such as Yellowstone, or the activation of the New Madrid fault could cause enough tons of ash and liquefaction, and even flooding to bury most of North America and south America forever.
We have absolutely no idea whatsoever the capabilities of natural forces. We come from an epoch of relative dormancy. We have evidence of entire continents beneath other continents, slid under oceans, or covered in polar ice.
You have no assurance at all this cycle is even normative, and all evidence would indicate this brief span of earths existence is NOT the rule but an exception. Most of earth has been chaos and upheaval and catastrophic events.
Imagine what an ice age would cover up? We have literally found mammoths with GRASS in their belly frozen solid. Meaning they literally froze solid in place while grazing fresh grass. We have absolutely no context for global seismic or volcanic activity, or tsunamis that swallow continents, or continents that fall into the sea or under another.
Despite your lack, or humanities lack of awareness, MORE of earths history was like that then the short space we measure as “history”. Our “history” is a theoretical construct not an objective reality. Really we have no idea what is even at the bottom of the majority of lakes and oceans on earth, much less under the ice caps or beneath the Saharan desert. It’s hubris at best, and mediocre education at worst that would lead you to assume that a person who found a single piece of modern electronics would have any method of determining what it is or how to use it. Especially because most of it would be rusted and mineralized fossils at that point.
One single event and entire continents can vanish overnight. Enough of those cyclical events and things start over. We have absolutely no idea how many times humans have reached this epoch of civilization. No idea at all. We don’t even have any idea what the ancestors of the Egyptians lived like, or who the sea people or Minoans really were, much less any practical understanding of what happened in even fairly recent ancient Europe. We are intellectually scavengers. We piece together bits and pieces and that becomes the consensus of “history”. No one would have any idea at ALL whatsoever how to access a single byte of data on earth if something as simple as electricity was taken from our civilization, much less quantum computing, ai or genetic engineering. Virtually no evidence of us would remain in a few hundred years on the surface given a large enough cataclysm. We don’t even know what is at the bottom of the sea. Were we put there, would anyone even know we existed beyond bits of useless trash? No.
Gotta give respect for being able to say "I don't know what it is." People make so many mistakes trying to find a definitive answer when they don't have enough information. Society definitely has to get more comfortable saying "I don't have enough information on this subject to present an informed opinion." rather than trying to make up one.
I’m a literure teacher and I just taught Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” today; when my student asked why there was all this knocking and curtains fluttering but nothing there, I just told him, “Spooky vibes. Poe was big into spooky vibes.”
Sometimes the casual explanation is clearest. 😂
A liturere teacher? Really? Wtf is liturere?
@@tonyjohnson8752 Just shoo. Nobody likes a grammer Nazi
people make typos
@@tonyjohnson8752 It is hilarious that you point out how they misspelled literature as 'literure' only for you to misspell the word even more. You wrote 'liturere', whether you were trying to write what they did or the correct word you failed.
@@trempor_9068 I was trying to spell it like they did. Oops.
my personal favorite theory about the baghdad batteries is that some ancient guy was running an experiment to see if he could make anything cool happen and that they didnt "really" do anything. Just some sort of fuck around and find out moment
I think that's what happened to
I honestly think this is the 'solution' to tons of historical mysteries. Ancient people were still people just like us and i don't know about you but i do goofy shit all the fuckin time for no real reason.
Literally jist some kid fucking around with pots and chemicals they found in the garage 😅
So uh. We've gotten a follow up video since this one was posted, and we have a MUCH more likely answer- might wanna give it a watch.
Basically Dr. Stone used that as a plot point. A kid named Chrome started to collect cool looking rocks and that's how he discovered science
I watched electroboom debunk this two years ago. Excited to get a more archeological angle to it rather than an EE angle.
small world
The classic mythbusters episode from 20 years ago was also great..they were hesitant to even cover it because they thought so little of it scientifically and labeled it hibbity jibbity hahaha, and were like sure it might have religious purpose to give people a faint buzz..but definitely not a battery
@@KaladinVegapunk omg was that the episode where the producers made them electrocute Adam and he was extremely pissed off about it?
And Kari's terrified "did you feel god" as her eyes said she knew they went too far.
@@danielled8665 Ahh horrific nostalgiac memories. Fun fact: the original producer was fired after that little stunt. I felt so bad for Adam (and Kari and Grant and Tory.)
@@danielled8665 I'm pretty sue that was the Ark of the Covenant replica.
I am half a century old. I am so glad the world has a you. FINALLY, the younger generation has an intellectual to listen to on a level they can understand.
Good on you, sir. I hope you live a thousand years.
With your level of income. And progressive technology. You might be here a grand or so.
“Half a century old” is a badass way to say your 50 years old.
As much as "ceremonial use" is a running gag in archaeological circles, I think it makes a lot of sense for the Baghdad Battery. If you have no conception of electricity and you grab a sacred object and it makes you go all tingly, that's going to feel like a religious experience to you. At least, religious chicanery has always been my guess about what they were for.
that was actually the theory the mythbusters tested. they electrified some statues and concluded that yes, with enough jar batteries, you could make a gold idol that gave you some tingles when you laid hands on it. not a completely implausible answer.
@@Saibellus Oh, cool! I don't recall that ep of the Mythbusters, but I'll have to see if I can go hunt it down.
Was that the episode where they made "An Ark" or something, and made Adam touch both of the statues and he got smacked by a shock from hell, destroying his trust in them and really straining their relationship? They were all giddy before and while it happened, and he was dumbfounded they believed it to be funny and thought it alright to lie to him that it isn't charged or anything funny like that.@@Saibellus
@@japanesecar1501 Supposedly that was heavily encouraged by a director who they all ended up disliking and who got fired from the show eventually. Im pretty sure Adam ended up forgiving the rest of the crew about it. Also the lie was that they told him it was attached to the baghdad batteries, when they had actually attached it to an electrical fence generator, which Adam was very right to get angry at because the current that passed across his heart genuinely got close to killing him.
it can definitely cause you to have a heart episode, the amps should have been small , but the shock is real, real. I believe fences for livestock differ, but commonly are 15ish kV, and fences for thick skinned mammals even 25-50 kV? I am now intrigued as to what the wattage is. I think "shock amps" to kill even an elephant could be anywhere from 3-10 times higher than a mans(it´s said 50mA through the heart is enough to disrupt with consequences, and will kill you with prolonged exposure, but it used to be a common experiment at a Czech university(atleast there, possibly all around the world), where you signed a waiver, and the prof let you feel the current with increasing intensity, topping out at 150 some mA of passthrough current for a bit, but that is my teen memory speaking.@@nabagaca
I've always thought "ceremonial purposes" was the archaeological equivalent of throwing your hands in the air and giving up.
True, but if an archaeologist says something was for “fertility rituals” you know it’s a s*x toy
No that is claiming aliens and comparing it to extremely modern tech.
@@brianmeans5965 The conspiracy theorists' version of "I don't know" is "aliens did it".
The archeologists' version of "I don't know" is "ceremonial purposes".
Dude, the fact that you contextualize the history of these objects within contemporary history is so god and valuable.
Plus … vey pretty
9:58 "all of these unbeleivably creative and beaitiful drinks"
Next episode: stirs a "jack and coke" with a peice of jagged metal
"Stole this pillar from a gravesite. Ah yes, it looks so much better in my living room."
My first thought: "Ah, proof positive that he really is an archeologist."
Lol
I once heard "The only difference between grave robbing and archaeology is how well you document it."
I remember talking to a friend studying archeology who told me "whenever there's a place with lots of seats and a pedastel and no explanation, archeologists just decide it's a sort of a 'church'/'ritual site' even if there's no further proof of that" and i found it so bizzare but with this video i see that's a common practice of "we don't know what it is so it must be X"
It's Occam's Razor. You start by assuming it's the most likely thing, and when you disprove that, you move onto the next most likely thing given the current evidence. It's more productive than disproving a long list of unlikely but possible things only to end up determining it's a temple 90% of the time.
@@battlesheep2552 there is a difference between considering the possibility of something and acknowledging it may be incorect rather than outright claiming it as fact though. it is also kinda questionable if you can really say something is "most likely X" just because you personally think it looks like X.
@@elio7610 I think non scientific outlets are to blame in this case. To acknowladge a theory's limitations is expected in academic circles, but media outlets often ignore caviats when trying to tell a cohesive narrative. Since this is how most of the public learns about science it results on assumptions becoming facts in the mainstream.
imagine if people in the past hang out for any other reason that mysterious rituals. would be wild.
@@signodeinterrogacion8361 caveat*
First thing I thought of when the acid at the bottom of the “battery” was my father making a mechanism for setting up a triple A battery to “safely” add voltage to his alcohol. Gave a quite literal buzz to the drink. Humans do weird things for weird feelings, always have always will. Maybe this is an example of that?
Your dad did what??
Could you describe this mechanism to me? For research purposes of course
☝️ The world needs to know
Tell us more!!!
EX FUCKING PLAIN
It was actually really satisfying to hear "I don't know" as an answer, instead of accepting or making up something half-baked just to have an explanation.
Also ooh a PO Box, I wish I knew where my old copy of Chariots of the Gods was, I'd totally send it. I was such a huge fan of Erich von Daniken when I was in high school.
On Mythbusters, they tried the purported design and found that actual lemons work better.
If you have lemons. But those are native to india.
@@4203105 I think they had spread to the Middle East by that point in time.
Light bulbs need wayyyyyy more voltage and current than lemon can produce
There is a video here on youtube of someone playing Doom on a potato.
Okay, a couple hundred potatoes powering a graphing calculator that runs Doom, but still.
So besides the obligatory "Doom runs on a potato" joke, it proves that even potatoes can give enough electricity if you chain up enough of them. Lemons or vinegar would be much more potent. The problem is rather that stuff gets off too fast.
@@zaxi0so the fact that a lemon works better than it further proves that it wasn't use for light bulbs
His partner's cameo was just adorable. We stan a loving relationship
Yeah she cute
She is. But the two of them are even cuter together.
That's racist tho
A wonderful marriage
@Oliver's 50th Account what the actual fuck are you even trying to say
The toilet thing reminds me that a museum did that kind of thing (in France) : they took broken parts from a 1900's water pump, and other similar devices, and let people try to guess what they were (without indicating the age).
There is also a TV show people people come to have antiques being expertized, and they had a segment where people would bring "unknown stuff" usually found in a barn, so that the "experts" would identify them. Sometime they could guess what it was, or had seen similar stuff, but other time, even knowing who owned it (a carpenter in the 1930's) they couldn't make any kind of guess on what it could be.
Of course it doesn't mean no one knows, but, if we cannot properly recognize things that were made just one century ago, it kind of makes you wonder how we could ever hope to identify the purpose of one or a few items made millenias ago, that came without context and are not mentioned in any antique source.
This inspired me to see if my dad has any old mud knives they're things that help with mudding sheetrock I don't know how to describe it Google it.
But I'm going to take the fancy plastic handles off of a broken one soak it in something so that it rust and then show it to a person interested in archeology have them guess what it is before telling them it's a mud knife
oh my god! I had the book of diagrams for this exact thing! it was about the motel they "dug up," and guessed the uses of the archeological objects they found, right? or am I completely off?
@@epice834 It's the book shown in the video...
P_,'- ft 5
Do you know if there’s a video or an article about the French museum event?
In the Middle East and south asia, some people still store water in copper jugs to purify the water. My MiL (peninsular Arab) swears by it. She's from the older generation in a rural village so she grew up doing all of the traditional processes for food preparation. Even crushed her own wheat.
I love that archaeology is a field in which snark and the ability to throw shade is just an expected professional quality.
It's not. And putting this archeological find on the same level as creationist footprints is incredibly stupid.
@@klof4276 Bro what
@@klof4276 Oh no, it *absolutely* is.
Scientists manage to be some of the most sarcastic, snarky people that I've ever met. It's impressive, frankly.
The Concept of those jars reminds me of a method ancient atheneans used to make synthetic pigments: they hung a piece of copper into a jar, put vinegar and/or other acids in there, put the lid on top and finally after some while they used the copper carbonate that formed as patina to mix green pigment. This technology was used besides producing mineral pigments (I can't find descent dating or examples on the spot but saw it in the acropolis museum)
Plus the iron when oxidized would give a slight change too. Or a few other ideas like copper sugars and lead sugars
Wow yeah that seems like a great explanation!! The acid in the jars could have been used probably to solely pigment or tint/patina the metal as I know you said it was also made for dyes so it could have been a multi purpose tool
@@tek4 yeah its crazy so much stuff can be done in jars maybe if they weren't taken from the place they could have found more, perhaps other jars had other chemical mixes and was like a rudimentary chemistry lab hahaha
For that matter, that would be a plausible route to making a battery by accident - you're just trying to make some new shade of paint and accidentally invent the tingle jar.
Of course it's still not useful for much besides pranking your friends and/or convincing them you've captured a demon in a jug. (Insert "bottle of djinn" joke here I guess).
Fermented copper
When you clarified the term asphalt it reminded me of how it being mistranslated led to the victorians eating all the mummies, I'd love to see you do a video on that weird time in history.
Eating WHAT
I definitely need some elaboration here...
Ah yes. Mummia.
Mummies were also used for paint
@@benjabby Europeans did not know what a spice was and thought the dead people were good enough
Well done! The Enrichment Center reminds you that although circumstances may appear bleak, you are not alone. All Aperture Science personality constructs will remain functional in apocalyptic, low power environments of as few as 1.1 volts.
The potato can also be used as a battery. The druids must have used potatoes to power Stonehenge!
Potato juice can be used as the electrolyte in a battery, along with electrodes made of two different metals. This artefact has the electrodes with two different metals, so that’s what makes it interesting.
Why, the magic of the druids!
Potatoes are a new world crop, they didn't exist in Europe until the 1500's
@@shmooveyea Not only that, many Europeans were superstitious about potatoes and eating them didn't catch on for 100s of years in most cases.
Potatoes where not part of the Old World at that time. And this is why there are not Pyramids in Europe... amoung other reasons or lack or reasoning......🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
My only regret with finding this video series is that its just at its beginning, so I shall have to wait so long for enough content to do a solid binge.
I feel that, having only found it late last night.
don't binge. binge watching is horrible for you and makes you enjoy shit less
@@DeathDealer_1021 regarding youtube videos, I enjoy binge watching very much
I remember reading somewhere that since the jars were exposed to the elements, it is possible that any papyrus or parchment inside had completely rotted away, leaving a trace of slightly acidic organic residue. So, by that theory, it wouldn't be that they put acid inside but that it was just created over time
This video certainly lends new insights to my work on a dried up potato that I found in a desert cave. It had two rods buried in it, one copper and one zinc. All this time I'd been working on the theory that ancient indigenous tribes were trying out new ways to cook potatoes. Thanks for your help.
I grew up in an extremely religious (young earth believing) family. My dad would do a Bible study every day with us and there was a time where he talked about this battery, the "light bulb" from the other video, and a ton of other artifacts like these with a huge young-earth conspiracy theory lense. It's extremely good for me to learn about what these artifacts were actually were... Healing lol
You have my sympathy
Ohhhh no poor you…….sheeshhhh lolz
Hope your healing is going well! Glad you get to learn about these things through fun videos :>
People don't really realize just how much Young Earth Creationism is legitimately a conspiracy theory, with all the negative connotations that brings with it.
I'm glad you got out and are getting the opportunity to learn what we, collectively, do (and don't!) know about history.
I graduated with my degree in archeology in 2009… if you’re doing the math, yes you’re right, I never used it… because yes, you’re right- there were absolutely no jobs.
Ty for this channel. It’s lovely to share watching it with a group of like minded humans who appreciate your rational takes. ❤
If you don't mind me asking, what do you do now and what was your favorite thing about your degree/ something you specialized in? You deserve to share your passion too and I'm super curious about archaeology so I'd love to know :)
hi one more sub closer to 50 ;)
@@meeomelovescookiesandhisto459
Maybe marketing or whatever. There was someone with a Phd in theater science working in marketing in consulting.
I have a Master's degree in literature, and I work the exact same minimum wage job I worked prior to starting my studies (luckily it's Norwegian minimum wage, so I'm okay). It's a shame the interesting rarely overlap with the profitable in this world.
I’m confused, sorry… why would a grad date give me a clue as to if you’ve ever worked in your degree field? I’m not great in math so maybe I’m missing something 😅
Listening to these theories I can't get over how insane it would be if 2000 years from now the only evidence that our society ever used electricity was a single AA and a mural of a lightbulb somewhere
A picture of a lightbulb in Mexico City and a AA battery found in Wisconsin
Our plastic waste isn't going anywhere. If humans are still around in 2000 years, which I really doubt we will be, landfills will tell them everything they would ever want to know about us.
@@ananthropomorphictalkinggo6641 Super valid point especially considering how almost no biodegredation occurs in landfills
@@cewla3348 I don't understand what you're asking
the AA battery though would be pretty unambiguous. It's too weird a collection of things with too many little optimizations to be much other than a mass manufactured thing in competition.
Science Educator here..
I LOVE telling students, “That’s a great question! I have no idea. 🤔”
It’s so important to normalize not knowing. It’s the fuel of science. And for this Google Generation, I feel like it will be even MORE uncomfortable to not know things.
I don’t know WAY more than I do know. And the more I know, the more I know I don’t know.
"Ceremonial purposes" reminds me of a scene in the prehistoric novel 'Reindeer Moon' where three women are embroidering animals on clothes. The first two give elaborate reasons for the animals they chose, something like "Our Clan has the strength of the mighty bear! Our Clan has as many people as feathers on a raven!" etc. The third woman can't come up with a explaination for hers, she just felt like doing a frog that day.
Partner of mine told me about a case where a bunch of old white guys were looking at bones with 28 marks on them, and said "must be ceremonial!"
When women finally started getting some representation in the field they just looked at those same (now even older) men and said, "Who counts in 28-day cycles?"
The old idiots still didn't get it, but at least everyone else does, now.
@@jadefalcon001 Academia has a cute little tendency to just outright forget women existed and also did things
I've seen that story repeated a couple of times, and the message is good, but it neglects the fact that people only experience super regular periods when they have healthy reproductive systems and are getting enough to eat. Plus pregnancy and nursing and also being at the beginning and end of your menstruating years also throw off timing.
@@jadefalcon001 Astrologers?
Priests?
Poachers?
Werewolves?
Reminds me of how teachers always insist that a painting or a poem has a deep meaning while the artist probably was like "damn that's a nice looking sunset imma paint it".
Your example of a toilet seat being interpreted as a ceremonial artifact reminded me of a scene in a French dark comedy reinventing the Arthurian legend (Kaamelott).
In the second half of the series, several episodes follow the journey of what is referred to as a crown by the noble who intended to gift it to King Arthur to earn his favor, then by the bandits who stole it from said noble, then by the court who managed to get it back and whose most ambitious knights thought legitimized their position as King Arthur's de facto successor. But when Arthur came back from his soul-searching journey, he crushed all their delusions of grandeur by immediately recognizing it as a simple fruit bowl.
@vianneyb.8776 - Perhaps the "toilet seat ceremonial headdress" was the inspiration for the Gallifrey metal collars worn by the ruling elites.
Nothing that you said was wrong in any way but you made me want to rant about this so I will.
To be fair, our modern and increasing secular global north society tends to take words like “culture”, “ritual”, and “religion”, and blow their meanings WAY out of proportion. Just because something is ceremonial does not imply that people thought the object channeled crazy supernatural powers or involved extensive cult-like ritual. Sometimes, these terminologies can refer to rituals and ceremonies on a small and personal scale. Bogolanfini textiles made by Malians is an excellent example. In Mali, Bogolanfini may be used to wrap up a mother immediately after giving birth. This is because giving birth is often considered a moment rife with the potential for violence and disaster that puts the mother in danger (just like giving birth anywhere else in the world). But the same patterns may be produced in Mali as souvenirs for tourists. These tourist objects are often mass produced in a factory and may be referred to as Bogolan as opposed to the extensive production process of more ceremonial Bogolanfini, but most agree that they’re very similar end products.
Tl;dr: “Ceremonial” doesn’t necessarily imply the opposite of “mundane”.
@@talex3844 Huh. Thanks for the rant, it was really instructive.
This is definitely important to remember and I'm sure most people don't.@@talex3844
As someone who makes things, I do love the idea of someone coming across something that I have made without real reason to test a new technique and then someone trying to derive meaning from it. The amount of randomly cut and assembled boards I have is nontrivial and some are finished well enough from testing to last way longer than I will. Sometimes it turns out, people were always people and not everything was made by an ancient people so alien to us that they don't have to entertain bored children or put things together just to see what happens
Man, when they dig up all my jizz jars, theyre gonna think my house was a sperm bank or something.
Some of my failed knitting projects will raise questions…“what human could possibly wear this shape?”
I love finding an entire bingable TH-cam channel with interesting videos.
“This video ends with a stark reminder of the cost of war to not only to the people who lived through it, but to people who lived before and to the knowledge of those who live after.” This hit me hard, because it’s so true.
Indy?
If i took a shot everytime i heard "it was lost during the bombings of germany during WW2" i'd be dead by tomorrow.
Fun sidebar: Portuguese sailors also introduced casava root to Taiwan around the same time as Africa, which became a snack in the form of tapioca pearls. This eventually led to, you guessed it, tapioca boba tea!
boba is so good though. If anyone out there hasn't tried taro boba, you're missing out!
@@kahlzun Taro boba is my favorite! :>
And Portuguese Sailors got it from South America, Brazil probably
@@NikyCROW here in Brazil tapioca is a little powder that can be filled with food, becomes 'taco-like' when heated
Man we never just assume stuff is toys. I could fully believe a "man when you touch this thing it makes you feel weird. Cool!" It's always gotta be ritual purposes 😴
Honestly unrelated but thats exactly what people did in england a century or two ago, just touching electruc eels because hey its tingly! (Casualties were many)
I can't wait to see how archeologists 5000 years from now try to justify sensory slimes...
Literally used to put those nice volt batteries on my tongue to feel the shock, I would not be surprised
Or like it turns out it was just one of those shock-pens in jar-form or something.
“Hey man want a sip of muh wine/lemon juice? Fight off scurvy?”
“Thoth yeah, brother lemme get that”
*zzzzzt*
@@UCannotDefeatMyShmeat T'was but a prank brother, verily.
Thanks algorithm me for bringing me to this channel. Man I love history and ancient conspiracies. This channel has the perfect mix of seriousness/facts and comedy. Love it.
My theory is that someone accidentally shocked themselves with a more primitive setup (i.e. the metals and the acidic solution, without the jar), and then built the assembly in the jar in order to prank their friends with it.
..
Since the dawn of humanity, people have been going to their friends with something weird and novel going "hey dude check this shit out lol"
Back in the day my friend got free milk bottles (the single serve kind) because they were expired. Tasted one, it was horrendous, and then gave all of us one.
Isn’t that what religions are?
I was wondering about shocks as a possibility. However, nobody would be able to feel 1.1 V with fingers. You can feel 9 V with your tongue but 1.1 V is too little for that too.
That's not even a bad theory. Just someone making a "clay lemon" and daring their friends to check how it tastes.
Wow those Ancient Aliens sure had really primitive technology! That battery sucks ass!
Birds? Are you serious? That are governed drones that protect the ice wall on the rime of the earth disc!
It does, but it also happened to be the Best Battery on Earth(if it was a battery, and if there were no others🤔).
Aliens can get to to earth from wherever the hell they came from but they can’t build a decent battery 😂
A fun idea for the use of the battery in a book would be as a way to safely transport secret documents. If it was opened the wrong way, dropped, or tampered with, the scroll drops into the acid, and no one gets to read it.
So a scroll gets some lemon juice on it and just evaporates?
Forget Ancient Aliens. Ancient Spies sound much cooler
@@Winter_hattyou’ve just created the best tv show ever and i’m mad i can’t watch it lol
@@jessh4016 papyrus is incredibly fragile, it would likely cause it to turn into a pulp if it didn't destroy the ink outright as well
lmao, back in the sixties my dad had a boobie trapped book he kept on the dash of his truck. had a gold frame around the edges with a coil attached to a 9 volt battery. the title on the book was "famous nudes of the world", every man or boy that ever got in the truck would try an sneak a peek an get busted when they opened it. dad was a joker.
I like the fact you say that you don't know what item was used for. You are the first one to admit that (on this or many other things) and not try to fill the gap.
"I really am starting to fill the role of the weird substitute teacher" those are the best teachers. Would always learn more from them than the actual teacher.
We like the weird substitutes. They’re funnier than the real teachers.
I had a weird substitute teacher straight up turn into our real teacher after the original lost his credentials. Dude was strange as hell so it turned into a very eventful year.
Had a bummer world history teacher for a couple months then BOOM, crazy ass Kendrick Lamar looking dude for the rest of the year. Loved that guy.
I was just trying to make him cry or quit whichever came first
Shit I thought for a second I had already left a comment 4 months ago when I saw yours and didn't recall having seen the video.
High five mate
"I stole this pillar from a gravestone"
Truly an archaeologist.
the pyramid was too heavy ;)
Tomb raider
_RuleBritannia.mp3_
The weird thing that i think people don't consider is that one Baghdad jar could have been a single kooky guy's side art project but for some reason it's being extrapolated that multiple people kept that particular combination of jar components
I hope we get a new addition to this series in the next few months. these are always so fun and lighthearted
How wonderful it is to discover this already iconic series only 6 episodes in. Added with the genius collaboration with the mixologist, this series is gonna go far. This is gonna get so many people into and excited about archeology
My grandpa used to travel the world as a diplomat during the Cold War, and now whenever he needs a bit of extra cash he gives something to a museum. So selling things to museums is still very much a thing.
That's actually really clever, I'll remember that when I fight in the next war
i think it was more about how if you make any new finds.
Ever hear of a grandfather clause? thought not.....
@@airplanes_aren.t_real that would be spoils of war, and completely illegal now.
Let's hope your g-pa travelled more interesting parts than the **gasp** midwest
@@favoritemustard3542 actually he has some amazing stuff (something people on this channel might like) is an intact Mayan obsidian shard
Holy hell my heart felt like an anchor as you were talking about the looting of Iraqs national museum. That stuff happens way too often throughout history 😢
Many local people are actually glad that the artifacts are safely in Western museums, instead of being sold to private collectors. That being said, greed, and destruction of context is always bad.
i always think of the Library of Alexandria... :/
@@noneyaratman714bigger thieves.
@noneyaratman714 I'm sorry but um it litterally was safe? The thing that changed was that the protectors of the museum had to leave. Riots and looting exist in the western world too. You are litterally the definition of a racist.
Crime against humanity seriously
15:36 "This artifact is known as the _baghDADBATTreh."_
I had my high school science teacher use this "battery" as evidence that ancient people were brilliant, and therefore bred dinosaurs as pit fighting animals. That's why they weren't on the Ark: because they weren't made by God, but rather the ancient equivalent of Michael Vick.
You and I had VERY different science teachers haha
what
Did you go to school in Mississippi by chance?
@@outdoorscholar6016 Nope. Just a private Seventh Day Adventist place up here in Maine. Wasn't my first choice since I was already very much non-religious at the time.
@@franklinhodsoniv8210 ya teachers a lunatic
That one ancient nobleman who was very eccentric and died alone is now laughing as the entire archeology community struggle to figure out what his completely random poetry work was because he incidentally made a battery
Yeah I'm just imagining a guy just gluing a bunch of shit together and someone comes over and he's like "what's that" and he's like "idfk I got all these old pots I'm fucking around with before I dump them off at the river"
No TV back in those days. Needed to do something to pass the time.@@nonpondo_
As someone with adhd who has made a lot of random useless things in my lifetime, I like to imagine that some of the items found today are simply just an ancient adhd project 😂
Mood
We may not _need_ this kind of All Yesterdays movement in archaeology, but it would be more fun.
I'd watch ancient adhd over ancient aliens anyday
My theory is it was like when you were little and made "potions" of random shit you found in the yard
@@silhouetted_shadow3486 I preferred mud pies. But I'm happy to say my cooking has drastically improved. It at least is no longer being used to fill holes in driveways.
“It has ritualistic purposes.” -we have no idea what it’s for
“It was used in fertility rituals.” -we know exactly what it was used for but we can’t say or our funding will be cut.
Couldn't it have been just some guy in antiquity like trying to invent something? Like people discovered just about every technology with trial and error. Maybe these jars were just some of those errors. Like "I wonder what happens if i stick some copper in this jar while I age some wine" or "I accidentally dropped some metal in my lemon juice and when i grabbed it, I felt a bit wiggly. I wonder if I can do something with that" and it just like didn't work.
I was thinking the same thing about storing papyrus like maybe it sounds ridiculous to us but maybe he was just curious...
That was exactly what I was asking myself! I mean, pretty much all scientific research from all around the world before the modern Era where just some individuals with maybe their own students just doing random things hoping something new might happen. And let's be honest we humanity probably invented the same things hundreds of times until one actually became famous. If only someone way smarter than me could answer this to me
I think that's a pretty poor explanation, because it really isn't one: It's just like ceremonial use - it's an explanation that always works, for every item imaginable.
It's possible, and cannot be entirely ruled out obviously. Yet, it does seem unlikely: If it's a one-off prototype/ experimentation thing made by a singular person, it's absurdly unlikely we'd find it. Only a very small percentage of items survive 2000+ years.
I feel like the papyrus theory might have some merit. It certainly wouldn't be a method used to store all scripture (metal was expensive), but maybe very important ones like holy texts. Have you ever seen how elaborate torah scroll containers can get with artwork, carvings and precious metals? I could see that.
@@bavarianpotato I agree that it is an explanation that would work for any item and I wouldn't argue strongly that it is definitely what I said, however I disagree with the feeling of how unlikely it is. It seems unlikely that any one invention attempt by a single person would survive for so long. However we know people did try inventing things that didn't work throughout all of time. It's almost like the math problem with the dart board. If you throw a dart with an infinitely small point at a dart board it is guaranteed to hit somewhere, but each infinitely small point on the dart board has a probability of 0% to be hit.
It is almost unfathomably unlikely that an individual's failed invention survives for thousands of years and is found. But with how many failed inventions must've been tried and lost to history it is reasonable that we'd find some. Also one caveat that makes this explanation a little more reasonable for this item opposed to others is that they are not found or referenced anywhere else. But in one spot there were several, all with minor differences.
Another way it differentiates from the "ceremonial use" argument that I like is that "Ceremonial use" implies the items we found were important. We are just as likely to find stuff that wasn't important to people as we are to find stuff that is. Like if 5000 years in the future one item at my desk right now are found by a future civilization with no context. There is no reason to think they will find my smartphone (Significant to our culture) instead of a random knick knack (Not important). In fact right now I have one smart phone and 4 purposeless knickknacks on my desk.
I know I did not argue these things were purposeless knick knacks, but I do think when someone finds ancient artifacts, people want to apply a lot of meaning to them. And a failed invention is an example of something that isn't meaningful
or what if they did have a purpose, it just wasn’t all that useful in the long run? The Greeks had an early prototype of steam engines at least 1000 years before steam power started being thought of, but they didn’t have any use for it so nothing came of it. what if these jars were something similar; a legitimate invention that actually did things, but it didn’t really do anything important so nobody cared
anyone else remember the Mythbusters episode where they tried to figure out wether or not it was actually a battery and somehow ended up making a replica arc of the covenant, hooking a cattle prod up to it, and electrocuting the crap out of adam?
Yep!
Thank you for reminding me :)
I'm pretty sure that's the only time I've ever seen Adam genuinely pissed off.
Yeah, Adam talked about this episode on Tested or somekind of Panel… he was REALLY pissed about that „prank“ 😂
Yep. The electric shock was producer's idea and nobody actually wanted to do it, but he convinced them.
In my first year of my archaeology degree, the professor brought up Motel of Mysteries and showed this exact image! He also made a great point about context using mobile phones. Almost everyone in that lecture theatre had one, but if we all suddenly died and were uncovered 1000s years later, what would our future archaeologists make of these intricately designed blocks of metal and glass? Ritual artifacts? Context is key!
Those phones all get a lot less powerful if the cell network and internet backbones all go down. Most of what we use them for is communicating with services not on the device itself. It's as much an access technology as it is a computational one.