Antiquity
The Baghdad Battery, sometimes referred to as the Parthian Battery, is the common name for a number of artifacts created in Mesopotamia during the Iranian dynasties of the Parthian or Sassanid period (the early centuries AD).
In 1938, German archaeologist Wilhelm König and other associates purportedly uncovered—there are conflicting versions of the details of the discovery—a set of terracotta jars in a village called Khujut Rabu, near Baghdad. Each jar contained a rolled-up sheet of copper surrounding an iron rod. Some scientists speculate that these are ancient galvanic cells, roughly 2,000 years old, though the artifacts' age is still debated. The jars have been dubbed the "Baghdad Batteries".
It is believed a common food acid, such as lemon juice, wine or vinegar, would have served as an electrolyte. Modern replicas have successfully produced small electrical currents, lending credence to this hypothesis. If the items were indeed voltaic cells, they could possibly have been used for electroplating jewelry, or to produce mild electric shocks as a source of religious experience, although no such secondary artifacts have been discovered. The jars resemble another type of object with a known purpose: namely, storage vessels for sacred scrolls from nearby Seleucia on the Tigris. Those vessels do not have the outermost clay jar, but are otherwise almost identical. In this way, they could have been simply used to store ancient scrolls.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Battery
Famous quotes containing the word antiquity:
“How do you know antiquity was foolish? How do you know the present is wise? Who made it foolish? Who made it wise?”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)