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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Medieval Africans had a unique process for purifying gold with glass (2019)
bargle0 wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
How impure was the gold dust from the chemical supply company?
dondakirme wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
interesting
ChuckMcM wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
Anyone have a link to the paper?
AlecSchueler wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
They had it in medieval Mali but it seems inaccurate to say "Africans"
had it even though it might technically be true.
snthd wrote 8 hours 50 min ago:
Can this displace the mercury process used by illegal miners?
Reuters - Insight: Amazon rainforest gold mining is poisoning scores of
threatened species
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/amazon-rainforest...
latchkey wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
Cyanide usage is pretty bad too.
goodmunky wrote 10 hours 36 min ago:
Africa is a such a vast and diverse region that âAfricansâ is
nearly meaningless in this context. But you already know that.
KolibriFly wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
Innovation doesn't just come from empire-scale institutions
bcoates wrote 17 hours 18 min ago:
This article leaves me super unclear on the metallurgical process going
on here--you fire gold ore on a bed of glass rubble and the impurities
are adsorbed into the ceramic or ???
colechristensen wrote 17 hours 8 min ago:
Yup.
A whole lot of chemistry process is just X dissolves in Y but not in
Z, and using that in order to separate and purify.
In this case metal oxides dissolve in glass (sand, which is a silicon
oxide, mostly) but gold doesn't A) oxidize under reasonable
conditions or B) dissolve in the glass. Sand or glass waste is
melted, the not gold dissolves into the molten glass.
kleton wrote 20 hours 12 min ago:
This is called cupellation. Romans used clay crucibles
declan_roberts wrote 17 hours 46 min ago:
Cupellation is considerably earlier than this method. Some 2,000
years earlier. Cupellation is also very effective at removing base
metals.
I'm curious how pure they get gold with this glass method. If it's
not as pure as Cupellation then that would explain why it wasn't
widely used outside of west Africa.
detourdog wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
What I love about the process is that it seems to have developed by
playing with fire.
cardiffspaceman wrote 4 hours 9 min ago:
Same for Vulcanization.
rsynnott wrote 13 hours 55 min ago:
I mean, you could say that of basically all metallurgy prior to the
19th century.
detourdog wrote 12 hours 59 min ago:
Ok lets say that.
motorest wrote 14 hours 39 min ago:
> What I love about the process is that it seems to have developed by
playing with fire.
Also known as experimentation, which is the whole basis of the
scientific process.
detourdog wrote 13 hours 0 min ago:
What is the difference between the two? No where else did the
scientific method develop this process. Play can produce surprising
results and methodologies stagnates development.
motorest wrote 12 hours 12 min ago:
> What is the difference between the two?
There isn't.
Referring to experimentation as "playing with" feels like a
attempt to demean the output.
rdlw wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
Only if you think there's something wrong with play.
detourdog wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
Sometimes it's best to interpret things in a neutral way. A
negative point of view hampers insight. I think the output
speaks for itself and doesn't need a defense.
euroderf wrote 11 hours 2 min ago:
"playing around with" sounds more dignified.
detourdog wrote 7 hours 33 min ago:
I don't perceive the difference. "working with fire" maybe
different but I'm still fine with my word choice.
JumpCrisscross wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
> it seems to have developed by playing with fire
Or someone melted down a glass and gold object and noticed the gold
that floated (precipitated?) out was purer than that which went in.
defrost wrote 19 hours 48 min ago:
Which is literally playing with fire.
Even today various artists playing with fire rediscover that while
gold doesn't naturally work into or onto glass it's still possible
to adhere gold to glass if the timings and tempreptures are "just
right".
teleforce wrote 21 hours 2 min ago:
Fun facts, Mansa Musa (Musa Keita) who's king in Mali Empire in Western
Africa is the richest person ever lived [1].
It's reported that he unintentionally disrupted Eqyption economy for at
least ten years. He did that by spending and giving charity in gold
enroute to pilgrimage or Hajj in Mecca while staying about 3 months in
Egypt. Allegedly he had hundred camels in towing, each camel carrying
hundreds of pounds of pure gold. Pilgrimage to Mecca is the journey
that every Muslim has to make once in a lifetime if they can afford it.
[1] Mansa Musa: The richest man who ever lived (105 comments): [1] [2]
Mansa Musa:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
URI [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951
romaaeterna wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
Document-only claim without any archeological support means that I'm
highly skeptical.
dyauspitr wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
Thatâs the vast majority of antiquity unfortunately.
opo wrote 16 hours 2 min ago:
As your wikipedia link states:
>...While online articles in the 21st century have claimed that Mansa
Musa was the richest person of all time,[91] historians such as
Hadrien Collet have argued that Musa's wealth is impossible to
calculate accurately.
We don't know the exact wealth of Manda Musa and there really isn't a
good way to compare wealth between different eras. Even in the same
general timeframe, wouldn't the khanates of the mongol empire be
considered more wealthy?
yieldcrv wrote 3 hours 16 min ago:
Mansa Musa was illiquid and could not exchange much wealth for
goods and services and had nothing to invest in during a time where
the gini coefficient around him would have been 1.0
It is marvelous he found gold and even then he could only give it
away freely
teleforce wrote 14 hours 17 min ago:
Nobody really know for sure to be honest but he's most probably one
of the top ten.
The linked BBC article in the HN post has the list for top 10
richest man in history with Mansa Musa at the very top but Shah
Jahan the Mughal Emperor who's the owner of Taj Mahal is not even
in the list [1].
The 10 richest men of all time:
1) Mansa Musa (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth
indescribable
2) Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD, Roman emperor) $4.6tn (£3.5tn)
3) Zhao Xu (1048-1085, emperor Shenzong of Song in China) wealth
incalculable
4) Akbar I (1542-1605, emperor of India's Mughal dynasty) wealth
incalculable
5) Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, Scottish-American industrialist)
$372bn
6) John D Rockefeller (1839-1937) American business magnate) $341bn
7) Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (1868-1918, Tsar of Russia) $300bn
8) Mir Osman Ali Khan (1886-1967, Indian royal) $230bn
9) William The Conqueror (1028-1087) $229.5bn
10) Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, long-time ruler of Libya) $200bn
[1] Is Mansa Musa the richest man who ever lived?
URI [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47379458
aquova wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
Is there a reason this list wouldn't include any of their
successors, who inherited the vast majority, if not all, of their
holdings? Did Tiberius not inherit enough of Augustus's wealth to
make this top 10 as well?
anton-c wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
Iirc he gave some to his wife(?)
Anyone who had multiple people in their will diluted it. Though
I feel Augustus got all of Julius' will which goes against
this, I imagine powerful people might have a few people they
want to leave something for when they die.
bernds74 wrote 9 hours 40 min ago:
Some guy once famously noted that wealth is not measured in gold
or silver, but in goods and services. Mansa Musa didn't have a
Ferrari F40, or an RTX4090, or air conditioning. He couldn't buy
a trip to low earth orbit or get cancer treatment if he needed
it. Many people in this day and age are vastly more wealthy than
he was.
rcxdude wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
Indeed, it depends. I think the way this list works it's
relative to the available resources at the time, i.e. what
percentage of the available wealth did they control?
rayiner wrote 5 hours 25 min ago:
That one way to measure wealth. Another would be to measure it
in terms of how much labor you can get from your fellow humans.
Mana Musa was far more wealthy by that measure.
Winsaucerer wrote 9 hours 20 min ago:
That's definitely a reasonable way to think about it. Another
though is in terms of social status and ability to direct human
labor, in which case most people are not more wealthy.
Retric wrote 7 hours 0 min ago:
On that scale Xi Jinping is likely the richest person to ever
live. [1] You rarely see modern dictators on these lists but
populations and economic prosperity have exploded to the
point where historic kings canât really compete.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping
Winsaucerer wrote 5 hours 25 min ago:
I actually do think of him as a candidate for wealthiest
person to have ever lived.
saagarjha wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
fwiw Mughalâ Mongol
LunaSea wrote 12 hours 7 min ago:
Aren't Bezos, Musk, Gates & co richer the first half of the
people on the list?
flohofwoe wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
Not until one of them buys the entire US armed forces, installs
himself on the throne in Washington and declares all of
California his own personal property - just to draw a parallel
to the number 2 spot ;)
rayiner wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
The fact that none of them could come close to doing that
aptly illustrates why theyâre not nearly as wealthy as
those in the past.
euroderf wrote 11 hours 4 min ago:
Soon.
DonHopkins wrote 9 hours 46 min ago:
Democracy Dies in Richness.
pelagicAustral wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
Only for 50% of the population
jl6 wrote 13 hours 35 min ago:
Mansa Musaâs headline story is that his spending caused
inflation in Egypt. I understand that estimate of Augustus
Caesarâs wealth is based in part on him considering Egypt, in
its entirety, to be his personal possession. It feels like
âowning the whole countryâ should probably outrank âcausing
inflation in that countryâ, itâs probably meaningless to try
to compare across such vast gulfs of time and place.
notahacker wrote 10 hours 4 min ago:
Musa had an empire too, one that possessed so much gold that
his holiday tips devalued the principal store of wealth in
foreign countries. Agree the comparisons aren't particularly
meaningful; a lot depends on whether your consider having lots
of gold to show off with to be more valuable than building an
industrial empire, or even owning a bunch of now-common
consumer goods and having access to healthcare more impressive
than anything Augustus or Musa bought
gregschlom wrote 21 hours 32 min ago:
This made me realize that I have absolutely no idea what was going on
in Africa during medieval times (and only a sliver of an idea in
Europe).
KolibriFly wrote 10 hours 46 min ago:
Same here, most of what I learned growing up barely touched on
African history beyond Egypt or colonialism. Stuff like this really
highlights how much was going on
jihadjihad wrote 21 hours 6 min ago:
Mansa Musa is totally worth reading about, as are philosophers etc.
like Ibn Khaldun and others (Ibn Khaldun wrote about Mansa Musa's
pilgrimage, wealth, etc.).
There was a lot going on in medieval Africa, I wish I had some good
sources, if anyone knows any I'd be interested in expanding my
knowledge as well!
jorgen123 wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
The wikipedia page about the Mali Empire [1] has a few books in the
Further Reading section. This one looks promising: African
Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa
[2] [1]
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire
URI [2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34928286-african-domin...
petepete wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
There are episodes of In Our Time on The Empire of Mali (incl Mansa
Musa) and Ibn Khaldun [1]
URI [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06kgggv
URI [2]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qckbw
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