Ancient Inventions

The jacket of Ancient Inventions trumpets its arrival like a Barnum & Bailey circus poster: "Greek steam engines...Stone Age brain surgery...the Pharaohs' canals...the Cretans' lavatories...Wonders of the Past!" In fact, it is a sober popular compendium of the odd and the exotic based on the worthy premise that people today aren't smarter than their ancestors — there is no evidence that the human brain evolved in the last 50,000 years — but are merely benefiting from millennia of accumulated knowledge and experimentation.

Did the ancient Chinese, for example, use aluminum? As far as we know, it was first isolated in 1827 and produced on a large scale only since 1889. Yet in 1956, archaeologists excavating the tomb of a Chinese military commander who died in the year 297 unearthed 20 metal belt ornaments, which were lab-tested and found to be made of aluminum, with an admixture of up to 10 percent copper and 5 percent manganese.

Because this seemed impossible, the reliability of the excavation was questioned. But Joseph Needham, the leading historian of Chinese science, argued that it was a great mistake to underestimate the technological achievement; it was conceivable that a Chinese alchemist produced the alloy by chance and kept secret his lucky accident.

Peter James and Nick Thorpe, two British historians of ancient times, have amassed scores of persuasive testimonials of primeval ingenuity. Their cutoff date was 1492; anything before was eligible: the saunas of the Aztecs, Roman central heating, Egyptian lightning rods. "Hand in hand with the belief that our time is the most advanced," the authors maintain, "goes cultural arrogance and the assumption that other races are less inventive than one's own."

The Chinese, long credited in the West for gunpowder, luxury products and a functioning postal system, also invented restaurants as we know them, including fast-food and take-out emporia. According to James and Thorpe, the world's longest-running restaurant is Ma Yu Ching's Bucket Chicken House, opened for business during the Sung Dynasty in 1153 and still serving noodles and rice in the city of Kaifeng.

The quality of ancient civil engineering often rivals present-day work. The Jewish historian Josephus described the harbor of Caesara Maritima in Israel as more impressive than the port of Athens, and until 1960, when divers spotted massive underwater remains, scholars thought Josephus exaggerated. Marine archaeologists call the Caesara findings "a 21st-century harbor built two thousand years ago."