Tag Info

England in 400BC was a broadly Celtic culture with Pictish remnants in the North; 1600 years later it had gained a lot of influence from Roman, German, French, and Norse invasions. Language, food, architecture, laws, and so on were much different. These are the obvious changes. Your middle age Englander transported to Iron Age England would perhaps guess ...

The problem with answering this is that Europe for the most part was illiterate at the time. We do know from the literate areas that there was tremendous upheval in Fertile Crescent at about this time. In this period the (illiterate) Dorians wiped out Mycenean civilization, plunging the Greek area into a dark age. Technically this was Europe. Then a horde ...

The transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age in Europe occurred later than the transition in the Middle East. It started in the south and gradually worked its way north. It was most certainly a period of bloodshed, but then that's been true of most of european history, hasn't it? You might imagine pitched battles of armies, one outfitted in old bronze ...

This paper (in .pdf) argues against ancient Chinese mathematics being aware of prime numbers. The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, dating to the 15-16th century BCE, indicates an Egyptian knowledge of primes evidenced in their fractional system, but it's not definitive proof. It looks like the Greeks were indeed the first.

Actually you should specify which medieval society do you mean. Middle ages saw very different societies co-existing. The difference was so high that while some societies had access to extensive literature and philosophy the others even had no writing and no laws. If you compare say 800AD East Slavic society you possibly would not find much difference with ...

Barter, gifts and payments - same as now. I'll swap you a sheep for half of that pig I just slaughtered. Head of the tribe gives weapons, jewelry to people to both bind them in his debt and to show his wealth and power. I'll work on your fields for a day in return for food and lodging. ps. the Celts had coins before the romans, rather better quality ...

The Celts were using "ring money" as early as 800bc, up until 300bc, when they picked up the idea of using coins from the Greeks.

As far back as 8th century BC there was evidence of 'proto money' in the form of rings, bracelets and other wearable currency items. They were often roughly made and sometimes had marks on them so they could cut them into segments to buy smaller items. They tended to be made of gold, silver or bronze and there are plenty floating around in museums and even ...

I do not believe that advances in metallurgy could give some societies any crucial military advantage. This is because iron weapons are easily captured and bought. Even if a society had no iron works, it still could easily acquire iron weapons and the archaeological findings support that there are plenty of foreign-produced metal weapons (mostly produced by ...