Venice Wood | The Same People (who moved) | Land Grabs and Gun Powder

(The beginning of Empire)  Buildings in Venice are built over 10,000,000 close-together, 60-foot-long, water-resistant tree trunks that were chopped down 500 years ago. The wood went through soft silt and dirt to a layer of hard clay that was strong enough to support buildings on top.

[If wood stays continuously wet and oxygen free it can last for thousands of years if you were to pull one of those from the muck it would look like it was cut yesterday. The same holds true for wood kept dry in low humidity like the 5,000 years old wooden objects they found in the pyramids.]

👇THE SAME PEOPLE  

Did ancient Greeks have any awareness of other civilizations, such as the Minoan civilization of Crete, the Etruscans, or the Phoenicians?

YES! Sure, the Greeks remembered the Minoans and interacted with both Etruscans and Phoenicians.

The Minoans, a mesmerizing civilization of the Bronze Age, predated the Greeks and didn’t coincide with them. They had merged with the Mycenaeans (the proto-Greeks) since ~1450 BCE and a lot of myths referring to Minoans are found in Greek literature (unfortunately, no historical archives survived).

However, the myths about the powerful King Minos, the Minotaur, and Daedalus (to refer to the most well-known) give us a glimpse of the events of prehistory as they hide a historical core for sure. The Greek authors of the classical period and beyond (Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato) wrote also about them, revealing the admiration of the Greeks and the hint that the Minoans had inspired the Spartan law. Although these claims were based only on the oral traditions, later archaeological evidence seems to verify it. (Minoans are evil, and inventors of Rome.)

The Etruscans lived in modern Tuscany, Italy during the historical period when the Greeks had already established colonies in Sicily and Southern Italy and had cultural and commercial interconnections.

Here are some facts:

The largest collection of attic vases is found in Italy as the exports to Etruscans were vast.

Some pottery workshops in Athens exported their whole production to Etruria.

This painting is from an Etruscan crater(~360 BCE) despite it looks very Greek. It is displayed in the Louvre. Image credit User:Jastrow - Wikimedia Commons

A lot of Greek inscriptions are found in Etruscan territory, some dated back to the 8th c. BCE.

The merchants of the Greek colonies were supplied iron from the island of Elba, and the mineral-rich areas of northern Etruria.

There was some fuss about the Tyrrenian (the Etruscans in Greek) pirates but piracy was a common phenomenon back then.  So, no big deal…

The Phoenicians were the people that the Greeks respected the most (apart from the Egyptians). They gave them credit for their writing system and the many references to them in Greek mythology also reveal their gratitude as it was the Phoenicians who assisted (through trade) the Greeks to stand to their feet after the Bronze Age collapse.

Of course, later on, they clashed for supremacy in the markets, but ultimately, space was found for both (The Phoenicians were more active in the West Mediterranean and the Greeks in the East).

The peoples of the Mediterranean were and are 'condemned' to live together. They have always known each other and always had a kind of delicate balance in their relationships. Well, not always…

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Why did European powers start dominating and developing at a rate which other powers of the time (Ottoman Empire, Ming Dynasty in China, Saffavids in Persia, and the Moghul Empire in India) could barely keep up with?

Folks often talk about how Europe got its global groove because of a few key things: religion, cash, and the thirst for fame. They're not totally off base—Europeans were pretty fired up about religion, chasing wealth, and flexing political muscle to spread their influence worldwide. That's just part of the picture. The real deal is way more nuanced and packed with other factors.

First, Europe's military game got a boost thanks to their knack for upgrading gunpowder. Yeah, it originally came from China, but Europeans fine-tuned it, crafting killer weapons like guns and cannons. That gave them a leg up in battles at home and abroad. But let's remember that places like the Ottoman Empire also rocked gunpowder. And winning wars wasn't just about having more fantastic toys—it was about savvy tactics, terrain, weather, and who you buddied up with.

Then there's the money hustle. Countries like Spain, France, Britain, and the Netherlands were pros at squeezing taxes from their folks and territories. They had it down to a science with heavy taxation, slick bureaucracies, hiring private muscle, and hitting up the loan sharks. This dough funded their big armies, built forts, and fueled advancements in science and tech. They weren't just getting fat off taxes—they also made banks through looting, trade, and snagging new colonies. Sometimes, squeezing too hard, like in Spain and France, leads to headaches.

Europeans had a grab bag of justifications for their land grabs, spouting off about the greater good, national pride, and divine rights. They also threw in some religion, culture, and patriotism to sweet-talk folks into backing them. But only some were sold on these ideas, and they often clashed with reality.

There's a whole laundry list of other stuff that played into Europe's rise, like nailing navigation and trade, nasty diseases wiping out native populations, and how the locals responded to European invaders. Let's face it: these factors were intertwined and dependent on time and location. So, wrapping your head around Europe's global takeover means diving deep into a whole mishmash of factors and seeing how they fit together.

Violence, greed, power struggles, and clever tactics characterized Europe's reign.