Posted on 10/27/2020 10:53:23 AM PDT by Red Badger
Even older water filtration systems have been found in Egypt, South Asia and Greece, but Tikal’s version was probably superior. Zeolite is used to purify water today because its pores are well sized to filter out microbes such as cyanobacteria, and its ions bind to heavy metals.Yeah, and the Hindus "discovered" the cleansing properties of the most oxygenated of the world's major rivers, the Ganges, and built its anti-bacterial properties into an entire religion.
not to mention large-scale slavery.
Although there are several hundred volcanoes in China/Mongolia/Tibet, Europeans wouldn’t know much about volcanic rock for filtering because they were exposed to so few volcanos. Same for the eastern seaboard of the USA. OTOH, California, home to 20 volcanos, New Mexico with 12, Arizona with 6 are included in the about 170 volcanoes in 12 American states active in the past 12,000 years. Guatamala with 35 volcanoes, 15 in Costa Rica, 21 in Nicaragua, 20 in El Salvador, and 45 or so in Mexico gave those living on the western seaboard much more exposure to and experience with volcanic tuff.
Did the Mayans get the specifics of the minerals or did they just notice that water that flowed from or over the rock-sponge tuff was clear of algae and tasted better? The tuff would have to be constantly dredged out and replenished tho, for the same reasons our home water filters need replacing - the pores clog over time. And if the clogged material remained in place, what clogged it would just leach out, now in a concentrated form. So what did they do with the dredged material?
https://www.tripsavvy.com/list-of-central-america-volcanoes-1491002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanoes_in_China
There are still Maya there today. The Spanish never did fully conquer them.
Where the Maya live today, even Mexicans are not welcome and sometimes ‘disappear’..................
..... a lot like DC..................
“...Nobody says the ancient Romans weren’t a great civilization because they commonly murdered babies...”
Also true.
But my further point is that Christianity was a sea change in western culture.
The Old Testament was about justice... everyone got that... even the Romans....
But the New Testament was about ‘mercy’ and brought the idea of compassion into the forefront of theology and western belief systems.... it DID change the world. From that point forward, it viewed ritual death and sacrifice as, not only brutal (as they always had been) and the conduct of very backward barbarians.... but also sinful.
‘Romans’ for example... understood brutality for what it was and used it constantly to subdue and coerce people. So, though they understood their brutality and torture were beastly practices and efficient ‘tools’... they didn’t regard brutality as a sin. ‘Sin’ for Pre Christian people was more like bad form than actual moral failure.
Christianity made murder and brutality an individual and societal failure to be seen as the lowest and worst of human conduct. With Christianity, murder and brutality were never again seen in the same way...in western culture.
Maybe, but just for the record, when Europeans arrived to colonize North America... they were horrified at the way native Americans treated prisoners they captured in their tribal conflicts.
The noble savage was not totally ‘noble’.
Go Maya!
Necessity is the mother of invention to coin a phrase
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