[CaptainJustice]

Well that settles it. Call off the troops, everybody go home! Sorry, Iraqis, we cant liberate you. We found an old battery somewhere near you. Good luck!

[Cachelot]

Perhaps it is too early to say the battery has been convincingly demonstrated to be part of a magical ritual

Nothing magical about it, they'll probably find the crocodile clamps to go with it, right beside the rack of whips and the meatgrinder.

Get bombing already.

[ffusco]

I bet they were used for electroplating silver onto base metals. I saw them do it with salt water on PBS recently. Salt water batteries connected in series produced enough current to produce oxides used to make a primative photo sensitive emulsion. They took a crude photo (more like a radiogram) with a pinhole camera.

[ffusco]

"War can destroy more than a people, an army or a leader. Culture, tradition and history also lie in the firing line.

Iraq has a rich national heritage." Oh Puke! Another utopian scientist without a clue. Hitler's Germany had culture, tradition and history too.

Iraq has had years to join the civilized world. If war happens it THEIR fault.

[Restorer]

Most sources date the batteries to around 200 BC - in the Parthian era, circa 250 BC to AD 225. Skilled warriors, the Parthians were not noted for their scientific achievements.

Although this collection of objects is usually dated as Parthian, the grounds for this are unclear," says Dr St John Simpson, also from the department of the ancient Near East at the British Museum.

"The pot itself is Sassanian. This discrepancy presumably lies either in a misidentification of the age of the ceramic vessel, or the site at which they were found."

>>Ahem. The Parthians were only a ruling class over Mesopotamia. Most of the peasants were still Amorite/Assyrian/Akkadian/Sumerian in ancestry. The cities throughout the Parthian period were strongholds of the Hellenistic way of life.

How could ancient Arabic science have grasped the principles of electricity and arrived at this knowledge?

>>Because it didn't?

>>The Sassanians, a native Iranian dynasty, overthrew the Parthians about 225 and ruled till the Arab Muslim conquest in 633. Nothing Arabic about either them or the Parthians, who were from Central Asis.

[dc-zoo]

Screw the battery and the horse it rode in on! Let's Roll!!!

[Bob J]

ON NOW! UNSPUN with AnnaZ and Mercuria!
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