Should have also said controversial. I was thinking of the Baghdad battery and stories of ancient insular priesthoods and mystery cults and their “magic.” But I did remember that. It’s a lotus but Egyptians also stylized everything.

The non-woowoo proposals I’ve read call for very primitive apparati that would have been possible with metallurgy of the time. If some, I dunno, bored priests and scribes over thousands of years figured out some neat tricks. It’s before the big medieval alchemy craze but thousands of years is a long time.

I also forgot about early optics, the Antikythera mechanism which could not have been a one off, early use of fossil fuel, etc.

I don’t think the thesis I referenced argues that abolition is the only thing that made tech take off, just that it supplied an economic forcing function missing for most of the rest of history.