How did ancient civilizations get the engineering knowledge required to build impressive structures?
In: Engineering
Trial and error. Knowledge was passed down, but it either was unreliable, as in oral traditions, or reserved for the elite class who may or may not be qualified to implement it and may have biases or political concerns acting against them. We frequently had to relearn things or learn things independently across multiple time periods and civilizations. We are also looking at the finished projects and the ones that survived, creation some confirmation bias. As well, some projects spanned multiple generations abd were expanded or upgraded over time.
Basically, we were just as smart back then, but resources and knowledge were in limited supply and created constraints.
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