Gunpowder

technology

A deflagrating mixture of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, arrived at by Chinese alchemists seeking elixirs rather than weapons; ninth-century Tang texts already warn practitioners that certain mixtures burn faces and houses. The earliest surviving written formulas appear in the Song military compendium Wujing Zongyao of 1044, and Song armies fielded fire lances and bombs in the following two centuries. Knowledge moved west during the thirteenth century in the wake of the Mongol conquests; Roger Bacon records a formula in Europe in 1267 and Hasan al-Rammah describes military use in Arabic around 1280. A technique, not a place.

A technology is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.