Companion essay to the third Arcanum World video.

In 1900, a Greek sponge diver came up from forty-five metres of cold black water terrified by what he had seen — bronze bodies, he thought, the dead at the bottom of the sea. He had not found bodies. He had found a Roman cargo ship two thousand years on the floor of the Aegean, and the corroded green lump of bronze that arrived in the Athens museum that summer would, a hundred years later, force the scholarly world to admit that some Greek workshop around 150 BCE had built the first computer — fourteen hundred years before anything like it would exist again.

The video this essay accompanies tells that story. This piece is about a different question. What other things have we already forgotten how to make?

The Antikythera Mechanism is the most spectacular case in the historical record. It is not the only one. Lost technologies are everywhere if you look. The pattern of their loss tells us something about how human knowledge actually works that the video could only gesture at.

The Romans built concrete that still stands. Their marine harbours have been underwater since the time of Augustus and are structurally sound. We have studied the material for two centuries. We know what was in it — a particular type of volcanic ash called pozzolana, lime, seawater, and a deliberate amount of tobermorite mineral that grows inside the concrete over the centuries, making the harbour walls stronger the longer they sit in salt water. Modern Portland cement does the opposite. It begins degrading the day it sets. Marie Jackson at Berkeley has now approximated the Roman recipe in the laboratory; we cannot yet make it at industrial scale at competitive cost. Every harbour built since the fall of the Empire has been built out of a worse material than the one the Romans used.

Damascus steel was forged in the Middle East between the third and seventeenth centuries. Crusader knights brought home stories of blades that could cut through European armour and silk scarves in the same swing. The technique died around 1750, partly because the particular ore the smiths used — wootz steel from southern India — became unavailable when the mines were exhausted. Modern metallurgists have spent decades trying to reverse-engineer the result. They have come close. They have not equalled it. The Damascus blades currently in museum collections cannot be made today, with anyone’s tools, by anyone alive.

Greek fire was the fleet-burning naval weapon that kept the Byzantine Empire alive for seven centuries longer than it would otherwise have lasted. The recipe was a state secret entrusted to a single family, the Kallinikoi. When the family died out, the recipe died with them. We do not know what was in it. We have theories — naphtha, quicklime, sulphur, pine resin — but no theory has been able to reproduce the behaviour described in the Byzantine sources, where the substance burned on water and could not be extinguished by sand. We are still guessing.

These are the famous cases. There are many more.

Tyrian purple required a particular sea snail and a particular Phoenician industrial process. When the Phoenician industry collapsed, the dye industry collapsed with it. The exact shade of purple that the Phoenicians produced for two thousand years cannot be made today. The pigment used in some Pompeian frescoes has resisted modern chemical replication for a hundred and fifty years of scholarship. The Stradivarius varnish that gave the eighteenth-century violins their resonance was lost within two generations of Antonio Stradivari’s death, despite his sons and grandsons being violin makers themselves. The construction technique that allowed Justinian’s architects to build the Hagia Sophia dome in five years and have it stand through fifteen centuries of earthquakes that have flattened modern buildings around it is still not fully understood. The Maya Long Count calendar mathematics can be reconstructed from the few codices that survived the Spanish, but the original astronomical observations that fed the calendar — the centuries of patient sky-watching that produced the numbers — are gone.

What these losses share is a particular shape. They were workshop knowledge. They lived in the hands of specific people, in the workspaces of specific cities, in the apprentice chains that connected one generation to the next. They were rarely written down in a form that could be reconstructed without the original masters. The Romans did not publish the recipe for their concrete because everyone in the Roman concrete industry already knew it. The Damascus smiths did not publish their forging technique because it was their livelihood. The Kallinikoi family did not publish the Greek fire recipe because it was the family’s reason for existing.

When the people died and the apprentice chains broke, the knowledge went with them. It did not fade gradually. It vanished in a generation. By the time anyone realised what had been lost, the people who could have rebuilt it were already a hundred years dead.

This is why the Antikythera Mechanism feels so strange when you first see it. You expect ancient technology to be primitive — something we built better versions of. Instead you find the opposite. Someone in a Greek workshop around 150 BCE solved a problem that the rest of human history would not solve for fourteen hundred years. Then they died. And we had to start over.

There is a sentence I keep returning to.

We are not in the third millennium of human progress. We are somewhere in the second great round of it. There were others before us. The strangest thing about what we know is not what we know. It is what we have already, several times, forgotten.

Watch the full video →

Sources

• Derek de Solla Price, Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism — A Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B.C. — American Philosophical Society, 1974

• Tony Freeth et al., “Decoding the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism” — Nature 444 (2006)

• Jo Marchant, Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer and the Century-long Search to Discover Its Secrets — Da Capo Press, 2009

• Alexander Jones, A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World — Oxford University Press, 2017

• Marie D. Jackson et al., “Phillipsite and Al-tobermorite mineral cements produced through low-temperature water-rock reactions in Roman marine concrete” — American Mineralogist 102, 1435–1450 (2017)

• John D. Verhoeven, Damascus Steel: A Continuing Mystery — Iowa State University Press, 2007

• Alex Roland, “Secrecy, Technology, and War: Greek Fire and the Defense of Byzantium” — Technology and Culture 33, 4 (1992)

• Inge Boesken Kanold and Roland Haubrichs, “Tyrian Purple Dyeing: An Experimental Approach with Fresh Murex trunculus” — in Dyes in History and Archaeology, 2008

• Joseph Nagyvary, Renald N. Guillemette, Clifford H. Spiegelman, “Mineral Preservatives in the Wood of Stradivari and Guarneri” — PLoS ONE 4, 1 (2009)

• Rowland Mainstone, Hagia Sophia: Architecture, Structure and Liturgy of Justinian’s Great Church — Thames & Hudson, 1988

Arcanum World publishes one video and one essay each week on the questions every civilization has asked. Next time — the day the wealthiest empire in the world ended in a single afternoon. Subscribe.

Smith was a former apprentice engraver who had taught himself Akkadian and Sumerian by spending his lunch breaks in the British Museum’s Assyrian Gallery. In 1872, working on a backlog of unsorted cuneiform fragments from Austen Henry Layard’s excavation at Nineveh, he came across Tablet XI of what we now call the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. The tablet was unprovenanced — pieces had been jumbled together for two decades. Smith was the first reader to translate it as a coherent narrative.

The text told a story Smith already knew. A god warned a chosen man of an impending deluge. The man was instructed to build a ship and load it with his family and the seed of every living thing. The flood came. The ship grounded on a mountain. The man released birds — first a dove, then a swallow, then a raven, and the raven did not return. He offered sacrifice. The gods smelled the smoke.

The cadence is in Genesis. The structure is in Genesis. The bird sequence is in Genesis. The mountain landing is in Genesis. And Tablet XI predates the Pentateuch by approximately a thousand years.

The lines themselves are worth reading. Tablet XI, in modern translation, includes this passage:

“I sent forth a dove and let her go. She flew to and fro, but there was no resting place, and she returned. I sent forth a swallow and let her go. She flew to and fro, but there was no resting place, and she returned. I sent forth a raven and let her go. She saw that the waters had abated. She did not return.”

Genesis 8:7–12 reads, in summary:

“And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. Also he sent forth a dove… but the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned… he sent forth the dove out of the ark… and she returned not again.”

The bird sequence is reversed in Genesis, but the device — successive birds testing whether the world has dried — is identical. There is no serious living Assyriologist who reads these passages independently and concludes they were composed in cultural isolation from one another.

What does that mean? Three things the video could not fully unpack.

First, the Hebrew authors of Genesis almost certainly inherited the flood narrative through Mesopotamian channels — most likely during or after the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, when the Judean elite spent two generations in Babylon and learned its literary canon. They did not plagiarise; they assimilated. Every ancient literary tradition assimilated the traditions that surrounded it. Originality is a Romantic-era idea, not an ancient one.

Second, the Babylonians themselves inherited the story from earlier Sumerian sources. The Epic of Ziusudra — fragmentary but real — predates Gilgamesh by perhaps another thousand years. So the chain stretches further: Sumer → Babylon → Israel → Christendom → the modern Sunday-school imagination. Four thousand years of telling and re-telling. Every generation believed it was the first.

Third — and this is the part the video gestures at but cannot dwell on — Smith’s discovery did not damage faith in the Bible. It complicated it. Many serious religious thinkers since 1872 have come to read the Babylonian parallel not as evidence that the Bible is false, but as evidence that some stories are too large for any one tradition to own. The flood is one of them. It belongs to everyone who has ever watched a river rise.

That was Smith’s real discovery, in the end. Not that the Bible was second. That the flood was older than any of us thought.

He died four years later in Aleppo, on a return expedition to Nineveh, of a fever he caught en route. He was thirty-six.

Watch the full video →

Sources

• Andrew George (trans.), The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. — Oxford University Press, 2003

• Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood — Hodder & Stoughton, 2014

• George Smith, “The Chaldean Account of the Deluge” — Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1873

• Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others — Oxford University Press, 1989

• David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh — Henry Holt, 2007

• William Ryan & Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History — Simon & Schuster, 1998

Arcanum World publishes one essay and one video each week on the questions every civilization has asked. Next week — not everyone has a voice in their head, and the people who don’t are sitting on top of one of the oldest debates in philosophy. Subscribe.

The oldest of them is around four thousand years old. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least three hundred thousand. That gap — the ninety-eight point seven percent of human existence that no current religion accounts for — is the most interesting question in the study of religion. Because the gap is not empty. Every cave we have excavated, every burial we have opened, every fire pit we have dated, tells us the first humans were already doing something. We just stopped recognising it as religion. The video this essay accompanies walks through the four layers we have uncovered. This piece sits underneath the video and traces what those four layers still mean in your life.

The first layer is animism. The world is alive. Not metaphorically — concretely. Rivers, mountains, storms, stones, the sun, the dead, and the unborn all contain a spirit that can be spoken to. Edward Burnett Tylor coined the word in Primitive Culture (1871), and for a long time the West treated animism as a primitive failure to understand cause and effect. The Hadza of Tanzania, the Sámi of Lapland, the Ainu of Japan, the Khoisan of southern Africa, and the first nations of the Americas have always known otherwise. Recent anthropology — Robert N. Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution (2011) is the foundational survey — suggests animism is the oldest, most universal, and most resilient pattern of human thought we have evidence for. You still do it. You talk to your car. You blame the rain. You sense the house is watching you. The wiring did not go anywhere.

The second layer is the ancestors. Sixty thousand years of Neanderthal and sapiens burials show the same thing: ochre, flowers, tools, food placed with the body. The dead were not abandoned. The dead were furnished. Death did not end the relationship; it changed the address. The grandfather who taught you is still teaching you, if you keep speaking to him. Every modern religion still does this — Mass on All Souls’ Day, Ching Ming, Día de los Muertos, the Hindu shraddha rite. So do the secular: the cemetery visit, the framed photograph, the lit candle on a death anniversary. You think you are honouring a memory. The ancient mind knew you were maintaining a relationship.

The third layer is the totem, and the law it carried. A totem binds a clan to an animal or plant: the clan does not eat the totem, does not hunt it, does not name it casually. The clan and the creature are kin. Religion was the law before there was law — the salmon clan did not overfish, the buffalo clan policed the hunt. The forbidden foods of the modern religions are totemism wearing scripture’s clothes: not the dog, not the horse, not the cow, not the pig.

The fourth layer is the mother. Around thirty-five thousand years ago, female figurines begin appearing in the archaeological record from Spain to Siberia. The Venus of Willendorf is the famous one; there are hundreds more. We are not certain they were gods. We are certain the pattern is too widespread to be decoration. Most scholars now read these as the earliest deities we have material evidence of. She survived: Isis, Inanna, Cybele, Demeter, Durga, Mary. The mother goddess never died. She was renamed.

Then, eleven and a half thousand years ago in southeastern Anatolia, hunter-gatherers built Göbekli Tepe — limestone pillars weighing twenty tons, arranged in circles, six thousand years older than Stonehenge, seven thousand older than the Great Pyramid, older than agriculture itself. Klaus Schmidt’s excavation reports rewrote the textbook story. Religion was not invented after we settled down. The temple came first. Worship came first. The gods built the city.

So what did people worship before the big religions? They worshipped what was alive, what was dead, what was other, and what was beginning. And then they built a temple before they built a town. Every modern religion is built on top of those four layers — and so, quietly, are you, even if you believe in nothing at all.

We did not invent religion four thousand years ago. We renamed something that was already three hundred thousand years old.

Watch the full video →

Sources

· Klaus Schmidt et al., Göbekli Tepe excavation reports — German Archaeological Institute, 1995–2014

· Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 1 — University of Chicago Press, 1978

· Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture — John Murray, 1871

· Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution — Harvard University Press, 2011

· Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess — Harper & Row, 1989

· Frank W. Marlowe, The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania — University of California Press, 2010

· Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest — Harvard University Press, 1999

· Brian Hayden, Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints — Smithsonian Books, 2003

Arcanum World publishes one essay and one video each week on the questions every civilization has asked. If this resonated, subscribe.

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What actually makes the Strait of Hormuz so important?

Roughly 20 million barrels of oil and oil products move through the Strait of Hormuz every day. That is approximately one-fifth of global oil consumption and roughly one-third of all seaborne oil trade. There is no other waterway on the planet through which this much energy flows.

The strait itself is narrow ‚21 miles wide at its tightest point, with shipping lanes only two miles wide in each direction. Every tanker carrying Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Kuwaiti, Iraqi, or Iranian oil must pass through it on the way to refineries in Asia, Europe, and North America. There is no alternative route by sea. The geography is not a choice. It is a funnel.

And on one side of that funnel sits Iran.

Why can’t the US just build a pipeline around it?

This is the first question most people ask, and the answer reveals the structural nature of the problem. A handful of bypass pipelines exist‚ notably the UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah line and Saudi Arabia’s East-West (Petroline) pipeline but their combined capacity is only a fraction of Hormuz’s daily throughput.[^3] Building enough new pipeline capacity to replace the strait would take a decade, cost tens of billions of dollars, and still not solve the core problem: the countries that produce the oil are on the Persian Gulf side of the strait. A pipeline across the Arabian Peninsula still has to end at a port, and most of those ports are themselves vulnerable to the same Iranian missile and drone inventory that threatens the strait.

In other words: the chokepoint is not the water. The chokepoint is the geography of production itself.

Could Iran really close the Strait ‚and what would happen if they did?

Iran’s military posture in the Gulf is optimized around exactly one scenario: denying the strait to other navies and to commercial shipping. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy operates hundreds of fast-attack craft, sea mines, and mobile anti-ship missile batteries specifically designed to swarm larger warships and disable tankers.

Most defense analysts agree Iran cannot *permanently* close the strait- a sustained US and allied response would, over weeks, reopen it. The more dangerous question is whether Iran can close the strait *temporarily*, and what a temporary closure would do.

The International Energy Agency has modeled these scenarios. A one-week disruption of Hormuz traffic, during which roughly 70 million barrels of oil fail to reach global markets, would likely push crude above $200 per barrel within days.[^5] Gasoline prices in the United States would spike by $2-$3 per gallon. Airlines, logistics networks, petrochemical supply chains, and industrial production across Asia would absorb the shock first. Recessions have started on less.

This is why the threat of closure is, in itself, Iran’s most valuable strategic asset. They don’t need to close it. They only need everyone to believe they could.

The $50 billion price tag: what America is actually paying for:

The United States maintains the Fifth Fleet at Naval Support Activity Bahrain, rotating carrier strike groups through the Gulf, an expeditionary Marine force, and a permanent air presence across bases in Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait. The purpose is explicit: keep the strait open.

Estimates of the annual cost vary, but research by the Securing America’s Future Energy initiative and studies from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School have placed the figure at roughly $50 billion per year attributable specifically to securing Gulf oil flows. Some analyses go higher. None go meaningfully lower.

The striking thing about this arrangement is that the United States imports very little Gulf oil directly anymore. Since the shale revolution, the US has been a net petroleum exporter. So who is America actually guarding the strait *for*?

The answer is: for the global oil market, which is priced in US dollars. And that is where the petrodollar comes in.

The Petrodollar: the deal that turned oil into a dollar-denominated weapon

In 1974, in the aftermath of the Nixon shock that ended the gold standard and the OPEC oil embargo that tripled crude prices, the United States and Saudi Arabia arrived at an informal arrangement. Saudi Arabia would price its oil exclusively in US dollars. In exchange, the United States would provide military protection for the Kingdom and, by extension, for the oil flowing out of the Gulf.

This arrangement later extended across OPEC had two enormous consequences. First, it created permanent global demand for US dollars, because every country that imported oil had to hold dollars to pay for it. This is what allowed the US to run persistent trade deficits without collapsing its own currency. Second, it tied the stability of the entire dollar-denominated financial system to the geography of one narrow strait.

The $50 billion a year America spends patrolling Hormuz is, in effect, the maintenance cost of the dollar’s reserve-currency status. It is also the reason why, every time Iran rattles its sabers in the Gulf, the price of US Treasury bonds and the value of the dollar move in sympathy. A threat to the strait is a threat to the dollar. And a threat to the dollar is a threat to every asset priced against it.

Where this leaves us in 2026

Three structural shifts have been reshaping this picture over the last decade. China now imports more than half of the oil that transits the strait.[^8] Saudi Arabia has begun settling some of its oil trades in Chinese yuan. And Iran’s missile and drone capabilities demonstrated in the 2019 Abqaiq attack on Saudi processing facilities and in recent regional exchanges have grown far faster than the Gulf Arab states’ ability to defend against them.

The question for the 2030s is not whether the Strait of Hormuz will remain the most important 21 miles of water on Earth. It will. The question is whether the United States will still be the country guarding it and whether the dollar’s position as the global oil currency will survive the answer.

That is the trillion-dollar question that almost nobody in the headlines is asking.

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## Sources

US Energy Information Administration, “The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint,” EIA Today in Energy. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55881

International Maritime Organization, Traffic Separation Scheme for the Strait of Hormuz. https://www.imo.org/

Reuters, “Explainer: Middle East oil bypass pipelines and their capacity.” https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/

International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), *The Military Balance 2024* -chapter on Iran. https://www.iiss.org/publications/the-military-balance/

International Energy Agency, “Oil market scenarios under Strait of Hormuz disruption.” https://www.iea.org/reports/

Securing America’s Future Energy, “The Military Cost of Defending the Global Oil Supply” (2018, updated 2023). https://secureenergy.org/

Spiro, David E. *The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets.* Cornell University Press, 1999.

International Energy Agency, “Oil 2024: Analysis and forecast to 2030” - Asia-Pacific import flows. https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-2024

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## Further down the rabbit hole

- **Book:** Daniel Yergin, *The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power.* The definitive history of how oil shaped the 20th century - required reading for understanding why the Gulf matters.
- **Book:** Michael Klare, *Blood and Oil.* A darker but well-sourced account of how US foreign policy has oriented itself around Gulf petroleum.
- **Paper:** Eugene Gholz, “Assessing the ‘Threat’ to International Oil Supplies,” Cato Institute, 2018 - argues the $50 billion figure may overstate the real security benefit.


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