On 2004-07-21 09:43, BroDavid wrote:

Can anyone tell me where to find information on the 10 foot toss and link? Is it even written up anywhee?

On 2004-09-01 02:27, The Mighty Fool wrote:
Would any of you care to hear my input on this? I garuntee, you won't beelive it, and I CANT explain where or how I found out, but, I have a weird angle on history.
I have no idea what the year was....I can't make heads / tails out of the language, and the calander was totaly whacked...I think it began with April and then went into January...something like that. All I know for sure is that it began in Spain (whose name sounded something like "I bury you"), a big war had just ended, and some guy named skippy-oh was the big man back in Rome.
There were all sorts of lousy jobs to have, but 'miner' was the absolute worst. No one was 'employed' in the silver mines, it was 100% slaves. Slaves worked day & night...it made absolutely no difference, because they were usualy underground. They had no sense of when the sun rose or set. The only real advantage of this was that conditions in the shafts (about 3 feet high) were so draconian and dangerous, that the rod-carrying sadistic overseers rarely came in to beat the wretches.

One degrading aspect of this slavery was that the slaves were forced to make the very chains which were use to restrain them. The process went like this: a cord of solder or rope or....something (I don't know what exactly) was wound around the round base of a stalactite, then liquid metal was poured all down the stalactite, covering the ring on both sides and all over. 5 of these were then broken with a cleved hammer, and melted back together into a chain of 5, which was fastened to a shaft wall at one end, and the slave's ankle at the other. This was a system of rotation....the young, strong, fresh slaves would be chained to the deepest parts of the shaft, so as to prevent any uprising. Each week, the overseers would come along and examine each slave, and the ones which had gotten injured / weaker / sicker, would be rotated to a chain position nearer to the shaft entrance. This was accomplished by breaking the second ring from the slave's ankle (leaving the remaining 3 attached to the wall), moving him to a vacant set of 3 rings, and re-melting the 2 rings shut fast to the 3. The rings were soft, but too strong to break with the rocks or bronze picks which the slaves had.

One day (at the time which I mentioned above)a slave named Sarcengitorix from a people called the alamany was brought to work at the mines, and somehow he'd heard of the rotation method and the method of ring construction....and had hatched a scheme. While making what would be the 2nd or 'key' ring of his chain, he urinated (I think, or possibly he poured a vial of vinegar) on a small section of the chain before calling for the metal. He was affixed to a 3 ring set deep in a smelly shaft, and once he was alone, he waited for the heat of the shaft fires to do the trick. Whatever was inside the metal on that section reacted to the heat...expanding I guess, and with some wriggling and sweat, the ring came undone!

Over the next few weeks, Sarcen gradually moved himself further & further up the shaft by affixing the key ring to different sets of 3. Finally, he was 'chained' to the outside area, where only the very weakest slaves were put to do the sorting work on the mined ore, and the overseers were careless. When one overseer stopped to remove a sharp pebble from his foot, placing his hammer on the ground within Sarcen's reach, his brains were made to see the light of day. Sarcen then affixed the bloody overseer to his chain of 3, and took off. It was days before anyone realized that the typicaly bloody & half-dead looking wretch lying chained to the wall was not a slave.

He stowed away on a boat to the African coast, snuck / drifted his way along the southern Mediterranian coastline, was breifly captured near Carthage by a Numidian rebel leader, ended up singing on as a mercenary, and joined a raid into Egypt. Here, though captured, the princess was so taken by his good looks and exotic appearance (by Ptolemic standards) that she convinced her father the Pharoah to make him her monkey. (The ancient egyptian equivalent of 'jester / fool') She loved to hear all his stories (through her interpereter) and when he explained the 'chain-deception', she decided to play a trick on her brother, by challenging him to chain her (with a gaffed set) and she escaped.
I have no idea exactly where or how it migrated or evolved from that point, but there you have it.

On 2004-09-08 23:14, The Mighty Fool wrote:
To Mr. Palmer:
Scipio huh? Was he around during or after some sort of huge war?

the word he used was like 'alemany' or 'alimony' or ali-somthing.