Let's get some perspective here. Before the 1920s, 95% of the earth's population lived in proverty and even more were illiterate. All those people with the knowledge of navigation and civil engineering were not spreading their knowledge base any. Open sea navigation were only possible with some sort of compass and really took hold when the sextant came into being. And time constrains were measured in months.
For most people, if the roof didn't fall down, that's good enough. Today? We're swamped with building codes that would make a Roman civil engineer spin in his grave and he would have absolutely no clue how we did the sky scrappers.
That one Roman civil engineer may be able to figure out in his head how much load a certain arc could hold but I rather have 97% of my population who can read/write. Our architects may need autocad but having a litterate population is heads and shoulders above Roman civilization.
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