The Maya city of Tikal is famous for its soaring palaces and temples. But something far more humble kept Tikal functioning: its water filtration system, the earliest known of its kind. Researchers recently discovered a volcanic mineral that captures microbes and heavy metals in one of Tikal’s largest reservoirs. Because the material is not found nearby, the finding suggests the presence of a deliberate filter.
The finding contradicts the long-standing idea that the ancient world’s technological prowess was concentrated in places such as Greece, Rome, Egypt, and China, says study co-author Kenneth Tankersley, an archaeological geologist at the University of Cincinnati (UC). “When it comes to purifying water, the Maya were millennia ahead.”
Nestled in the tropical forests of northern Guatemala, Tikal flourished for more than 1000 years. At the height of its prosperity, around 700 C.E., it’s thought to have been home to more than 45,000 people. “It was one of the preeminent Maya cities,” says Nicholas Dunning, a UC geoarchaeologist.
On this day, 21 February 1848, the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was published. Translated into over 200 languages, and widely read by workers across the world, it remains one of the most influential texts ever written. Its chapter 1 begins with a note on history:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes…
"The modern bourgeois [capitalist] society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”
You can get a modern edition of it here, with an introduction by historian Eric Hobsbawm: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/books/products/the-communist-manifesto-a-modern-edition-karl-marx-and-frederick-engelshttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1925782564273551/?type=3
