Thirteen elements that were 'found' in ancient times (and do not have a discovery date) Quiz

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Ancient Elements Quiz

by Flick

Created Jun 14, 2011 in Science
Featured Sep 15, 2011
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	dancastro:	Sep 15th, 2011 at 18:04 GMT		28 points
	By the way, mercury (named after the planet Mercury) is the only element that has kept the name that it had in the Middle Ages, when alchemy was mixed with astrology. The other elements named after heavenly bodies were gold (Sun), silver (Moon), iron (Mars), copper (Venus), tin (Jupiter) and lead (Saturn).

	WyvernSabres:	Sep 15th, 2011 at 18:05 GMT		33 points
	Good quiz! Not sure why the front page ("These are your grandparent's elements") should suffer from the misapprehension that I only had one grandparent, though.

	InsertCleverName:	Sep 15th, 2011 at 18:20 GMT		66 points
	About halfway through, I had to start yelling at myself, "Stop trying gasses, idiot!"

	deuce221:	Sep 15th, 2011 at 20:11 GMT		7 points
	@dancastro: Ahh that's an interesting little piece of trivia, I wonder why mercury's name was never changed. But did you mean astronomy and not astrology?

	Rayavi:	Sep 15th, 2011 at 20:48 GMT		13 points
	A good rule of thumb for this quiz? Keep trying the elements which still have their chemical symbols taken from the Latin names. It doesn't work for all of them, but it helps.

	dancastro:	Sep 15th, 2011 at 20:58 GMT		11 points
	@deuce221: until the 17th century there wasn't a clear boundary between astronomy and astrology. In fact the main purpose of the ephemerides (tables showing the movement of planets) was to know the position of each heavenly body at the moment of your birth to (supposedly) foretell your future. That's why I said "astrology": as a pseudoscience, it matches better with alchemy, another pseudoscience (you can't turn lead into gold either). As for mercury, the element is also called hydrargyrum (hence the symbol Hg) but this name is seldom if ever used. I don't know why the astrological name continued to be used only in this case.

	pfrijiritr:	Sep 15th, 2011 at 22:38 GMT		12 points
	Not a single one of these are -ium elements. In fact, this comment is the first time in this quiz page that that string of three characters even occurs.

	koopa08:	Sep 15th, 2011 at 22:40 GMT		1 point
	Can't believe I got them all!!!

	montylaw:	Sep 15th, 2011 at 22:42 GMT		5 points
	Good comments - learned a lot from them.

	Bobman1:	Sep 16th, 2011 at 00:19 GMT		11 points
	@dancastro, wasn't mercury called quicksilver for many years? I'm thinking 1600s-1800s... That might have been a common (i.e. non-scientific) term, not sure. And did nobody ever call it Hermes? No love for the Greeks.

	dancastro:	Sep 16th, 2011 at 00:39 GMT		9 points
	@Bobman1: you're right, quicksilver was a popular name for mercury in English. It was quite a logical name, as its color is silverish and it's liquid at room temperature (unless your room is under -40ºF/-40ºC). The association with silver was also made in other languages. The Latin name hydrargyrum that I quoted actually is from Greek and means "liquid silver" (hydr- is 'water' and argyros is 'silver'). In Italian it was argento vivo, i.e. 'living silver'.

	volkstraum:	Sep 16th, 2011 at 18:36 GMT		2 points
	Hopefully one of my ancient ancestors was not the one to discover arsenic.

	Extinctanimals22:	Sep 16th, 2011 at 20:59 GMT		1 point
	Well this should help my Chemistry test tuesday!

	chikka2:	Sep 18th, 2011 at 13:38 GMT		2 points
	"wolfram" for tungsten won a TV quiz I was on long ago and far away...but not here! Super quiz, I learned a lot from it and from the comments

	TaliTek:	Sep 18th, 2011 at 15:53 GMT		1 point
	the timer din't work so I got like 5 mins :S still got them all though :)

	D_Mac:	Sep 20th, 2011 at 00:30 GMT		2 points
	In addition to its astrological name, mercury was also called quicksilver in ancient times since it was considered to be fast-flowing silver.

	DarcDiscordia:	Sep 23rd, 2011 at 12:48 GMT		1 point
	The only reason I got antimony and bismuth were thanks to Gunnerkrigg Court.

	deuce221:	Sep 30th, 2011 at 19:29 GMT		3 points
	@dancastro: Thanks! That's what I love about Sporcle, I learn so much.

	Wolfie0890:	Oct 8th, 2011 at 23:58 GMT		1 point
	I feel like dropping out of college (not really) and taking all of my classes on Sporcle.... I learn so much more about what I want to know...

	Yawwii:	Oct 23rd, 2011 at 19:57 GMT		1 point
	would be good if it accepted Sulphur for Sulfur. (Although, it might, my computer is glitchy and Antimony didn't get accepted either.)