this is whats called a ‘coffer dam’, you basically build some walls, drop them in the water, tie them together, and then pump out the water from your new hole in the water so you can build while staying dry
its oddly not that hard- the flippin ROMANS were able to do it with logs and mud
occasionally particularly devious people would use this to hide treasure or tombs underneath the river so its not only impossible to find but impossible to get to without an engineer division
that last part gives me ideas for campaigns
“Not that hard – the ROMANS were able to do it” – people seriously underestimate how advanced some ancient cultures were and the organized effort it takes to come up with something like this and actually implement it. The Romans had heated floors, glass windows and ceilings that could be rotated to reflect what you were eating (forests for game, sea landscapes for fish). Hell, the Greeks built cameras and moving robots. The Minoans, who lived four thousands years ago and were wiped out by a tsunami three times as powerful as the one which devasted Japan in 2011, had running water and modern toilets. And let’s not get into how China basically invented everything centuries before anyone else.
Bottom line: just because someone was already doing it thousands of years ago, doesn’t mean it’s not very difficult and an extraordinary feat of engineering.
someone: you build how many bridges on a single military campaign…?
oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the mayans and cleopatra lived in a time nearer to pizza hut’s invention than to the pyramids being built
I need a noncomprehensive history book that covers Known World History in time periods, like “in this century, all this shit was happening concurrently” and not just all spread out so I have to piece it together like some unpaid uneducated scholar
Mongols were fighting Samurai in Japan and Knights in Europe at the same time.
Star Wars a New Hope came out the same year as the last execution in France by Guillotine.
Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allen Poe were friends in their early 20′s.
When the Great Pyramids were being built there were areas that still had Woolly Mammoths roaming.
Harvard University didn’t teach calculus in its first few years after being established because calculus wasn’t invented yet.
Nintendo was founded two years after the Eiffel Tower was constructed
This is the book you want: The Timetables of History – going year by year (or in the earlier sections, at least century by century) and showing you what was going on in various parts of the world in several categories (e.g. Politics, Literature, Science, etc.) Super useful for visualizing what events were happening at the same time.
looking at Wikipedia’s pages for years, decades, or centuries can also be fun for this reason
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