500 B.c.

[Watchman]

Well, of course. Long-distance trade was well established already in the Stone Age. I was just talking about the means of transactions, which are often quite important.

Coinage is kinda funny because those royal profiles and suchlike actually improve its value beyond its base metal content. Isn't the idea the minting acts as a sort of "proof of quality" of the coins, a quarantee they're of at least minimum content of gold or whatever and not too badly debased with other metals ? Paper money moves to the field of pure symbolical value already, but let's not go into that.

[master of the puppets]

you belittle the influence of iron my freinds, this was the age when the first large iron plow was invented. without it socratese probably would have been out farming from dawn til dusk and would have had no time for his writings, the plow redused the time it took to farm by almost half, which gave time for thinking. its almost like evolution, when food became readily available it...oh crap, the bell, i'll continue this later.

[Franconicus]

Why did it end? In Roman time there was a lot of iron + trade + everything. But people were not that creative. And today. At least the western coutries have enought food and time and iron.

[Watchman]

I'm not sure the basic iron-shod plow was all *that* important - not the way the much later heavy deep-turning plow which allowed the heavy loam regions of Europe to be effectively farmed ("and had more influence on European history than any Napoleon or Charlemagne") was, for example.

Iron, being a far cheaper metal to make tools from than bronze, must however have had very considerable economic impact. By what I've read of it bronze was something of a luxury good, and in a sense the Bronze Age was still partially Late Stone Age as most folks had to make do without it. Iron is *way* more readily available, so its introduction ought to have pretty much shattered the old power relations and status structures.

Why did it end? In Roman time there was a lot of iron + trade + everything.

Climate conjecturals, partly. The Late Antiquity period was one of global regression, unrest and collapsing empires when the weather got colder and the vast population base and ecology the earlier warm upswing had fostered was no longer fully sustainable.

Sheer organizational entropy, incessant civil strife and disease migrations (ie. new and never before seen plagues arriving in the region) did their part as far as Europe is concerned, too.

[master of the puppets]

ok i'm back, basiclly what i was saying was that iron introduced something that there was little of before, free time. the plow meant less time farming, the iron ax took less time to chop wood, iron weapons meant less insentive fpor war but in some cases provoked it. iron made working quicker and gave time for playing and story-telling and thinking which quickly brought the the basic human intelligence up a notch. its the difference between a chimp and lemur, lemur spends 75% of its waking time looking for food and eating, a chimpanzee which has more food spends about 40%. the rest is devoted to play which stimulates the brain. so the philosophical revolution can be directly related to the how much time humans could spend on such matters.

it may also indicate a break in society, where prior to this kings were kings but besides them almost everyone was a worker of some kind, only a few could afford to do nothing, but around this time the classes of rich and poor grew more seperate, the poor became laboring farmers devoted to the earth to survive, while others, rich merchants could afford to have free time, so they or there sons may start to like at life in a certain view aka. philosophy.

[Franconicus]

Puppetmaster,

if you are right, and I assume you are, then we should be much better than the guys then. How many hours do we have to work to get food, house, cloths ...? We have much more time spend. But I know hardly anybody who is able to compete with Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Arimethes, Thales, Aristoteles, ... .
Maybe we are just waiting our time?

[Watchman]

"It's not what you have, but how you use it" as the old chestnut goes.

On the other hand, a modern middle-class Westerner in some quite fundamental ways lives in more comfort and luxury than the kings of previous eras. He or she is also most of the time fully literate and by the standards of bygone ages extremely well educated. Should he or she decide to devote time to such pursuits, there's no real limit to how much sheer education and knowledge a person can accumulate.

Whether it can be processed into something useful is a bit another question, and highly dependent upon the individual.

[Kraxis]

Puppetmaster,

if you are right, and I assume you are, then we should be much better than the guys then. How many hours do we have to work to get food, house, cloths ...? We have much more time spend. But I know hardly anybody who is able to compete with Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Arimethes, Thales, Aristoteles, ... .
Maybe we are just waiting our time?

Maybe we are wasting out time... But look at the personalities we have had in the recent centuries. They easily topple those people. Einstein, Hawkings, Bohr, Newton, Decartes, Freud... I could go on with philosophers, moralists and inventors (a very important branch as they are what drives the progress).

Do you really think we are comparable to the 700BC peasant in what we think and do? Yes, we are better than the average 700BC peasant. Out best people might not be better than Socrates or Plato, but we have many more that are equal.
You can't argue that nobody has done similar acts as to what they did, as we all still start at the level of the 700BC peasant or less, and we still have to progress beyond Socrates to do something more. We get help, but the progress within philosophy for isntance in fairly slow, though it has been progressing supremely faster than it ever did from Socrates to Aristotle.

[Kraxis]

Why did it end? In Roman time there was a lot of iron + trade + everything. But people were not that creative. And today. At least the western coutries have enought food and time and iron.

It wasn't as if they stopped. They merely looked at other fields, architecture, city planning, infrastructure... They were perhaps not as academic but they kept their creativity.
In late antiquity it was another matter, but still people still thought about life and wrote about it, just to an even lesser extent as what they knew began to crumble around them.