Michael Heiser — The Baghdad Battery: Did Ancient People Enjoy Electricity Like We Do?

Dr. Michael Heiser discusses the Baghdad Battery, and whether or not ancient people had the benefit of electricity for everyday living. And if they were using electricity, who brought it to them?

The Baghdad Battery: Proof of Advanced Energy Technology?

Even if the Baghdad battery was indeed a workable means of storing energy, it is no proof of advanced energy technology in the ancient world. There are some obvious reasons for this.

First, given the low voltage of reconstructions noted, for the Baghdad battery to be of any meaningful use, the ancient people who fashioned the object would need tens of thousands of them to produce power for a village or, say, to light up a temple. The Baghdad battery is the only such artifact known. One would expect the excavations at the site where the battery was found to produce at least a few dozen batteries if this was indeed an energy source used by the people who lived there, but there is no evidence of this.

Second, the battery was discovered in a Parthian-era (Sassanian) site. This places its age at 250 B.C. – 650 A.D. This is a far cry from the civilizations of ancient Babylon or Akkad, civilizations that ancient alien and alternative history theorists want their viewers and readers to associate with the discovery. The Baghdad batter is more than two millennia removed from those great Mesopotamian civilizations. Consequently, it is not even evidence for weak energy storage for those more ancient civilizations, much less proof of high energy science in great antiquity.

Resources:

• M. Jeffrey Oakes, “A Brief History of Batteries and Stored
Energy,” Neta World (Summer, 2006) http://www.netaworld.org/sites/default/files/public/neta-journals/NWSU06-OakesFeature.pdf
• Wilhelm König, “Ein galvanisches Element aus der Partherzeit?”
Forschungen und Fortschritte 14:1 (1938): 8–9
• Arran Frood, “Riddle of 'Baghdad's batteries',” BBC News (27
February, 2003) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2804257.stm#story
• Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, “The ‘Batteries of Babylon’,” Bad
Archaeology blog (December 2009) http://www.badarchaeology.com/out-of-place-artefacts/anomalously-old-technology/the-%E2%80%98batteries-of-babylon%E2%80%99/
• Gerhard Eggert, “On the Origin of a Gilding Method of the
Baghdad Silversmiths,” Gold Bulletin 28:1 (1995): 12–16 https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF03214732.pdf

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The Baghdad Battery: Did Ancient People Enjoy Electricity Like We Do?
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