Back to the future: how did people communicate in ancient times?

As soon as people learned to communicate with the help of sounds (who are we kidding, some echoes of the past still haunt us), we began to find new ways to talk to each other with the help of words. .

Because, as the famous saying goes: “I learned something interesting, share it with a friend urgently.” And if you lived in neighboring houses this wouldn’t be a problem, but what about those who met at the fair and lived in different villages? The desire to exchange information became the main engine of progress, and humanity decided to find different ways of communication. Believe me, the road was long and thorny: from the messengers to the radio. Now, of course, we have a phone with which we can communicate with our friends and loved ones all over the world.

And in order not to get into a situation where an unexpected female voice during a call does not tell you “there is not enough money to make a call”, Beeline and the Fast Payment System (FPS) came up with a convenient promotion: From April 1 – June 30, 2023, through SBP for Beeline services When paying 500 rubles or more, all users will receive 5% bonus rubles to their beeline account. When paying online using SBP, you do not need to enter the card number, cardholder name and other details. It is enough to confirm the transaction by clicking the “SBP Pay” button and going to your bank’s mobile application and checking the payment amount.

But let’s go back in time and see how humanity was communicating before the invention of the telephone. Shall we begin?

Homeric whistle

Guanches, the indigenous people of the Canary Islands, have found a way to effectively tell the latest gossip. They invented the whistled language, which allowed messages to be transmitted over a distance of up to five kilometers. This language was once widespread on all the islands of the Canary archipelago, but currently continues to be actively used only on the island of Gomera.

pigeons

Pigeon mail was popular among all the great civilizations of antiquity and was considered the highest quality and safest in medieval Europe. There is a legend that it was thanks to the pigeon that the founder of the Rothschild family got the result of the Battle of Waterloo two days before the others and managed to conclude a profitable deal with French securities.

Avatar’s adventures in fire, water and more

The ancient Greeks talked a lot, so they came up with a clever way to communicate using fire. Polybius’ torch telegraph was a cumbersome construction and involved the construction of two trenches with five spaces. The 24 letters of the Greek alphabet were divided into five groups so that each letter corresponded to a two-digit code: the group number and the ordinal number of the letter in the group. Unfortunately there was no time and energy for “You will die a tick” as the system does not allow long messages to be forwarded.