AlunSalt

One of the things that has kept me occupied recently is a series of trips down to Oxford chasing various plans and excavation reports. The series of plans I talked about last month can be found in a book Die griechischen Tempel in Unteritalien und Sicilien by Robert Koldewey and Otto Puchstein. I say in [...]

This is a case of peering over my shoulder. I’m working with the Greek calendar at the moment. The problem is there is no Greek calendar, each city had its own calendar, and I can never remember the names of all the months, especially when months with the same name appear at different times in [...]

From HASTRO-L comes news of the live unveiling of the Archimedes Palimpsest at 4pm PST on August 4, which is midnight onwards GMT, or 1am BST. The press-kit states “Join us at the Exploratorium or online as we watch ancient text revealed and read for the first time in a thousand years!“, which makes them [...]

I’d heard that an announcement was forthcoming about the Antikythera Mechanism, but I wasn’t expecting anything till October. The plan was to read around it when I had time this summer and then appear terribly wise in the autumn. So while Badgerminor at Orbis Quintus and Glaukôpis at Glaukôpidos are talking about it, I [...]

Corvus the Crow, from Uranographicarum reworking at Hubblesource.
I’ve just picked up this month’s Sky and Telescope. It’s pretty rare that I get it because it’s not sold anywhere locally. The reason why I should perhaps make more of an effort, or else re-subscribe to the S&T archive, is Ed Krupp’s column Rambling through the Skies.
This [...]

Not recent news, and I had lifting whole stories for quotes, but I need a record of the news story and it looks like it’s disappearing from ANSA.

Modern Greece is well defined, with the minor difficulty over the sovereignty of Mount Athos. Ancient Greece is a different matter. In the early first millennium BC Greece was arguably not united by land but by the Aegean Sea. Greek cities surrounded the Aegean, lying on its shores. In the ninth century something peculiar happens. [...]

Mosaic depicting Anaximander with a sundial.
It’s hard to know how to open something on Anaximander. Herodotus had the right idea. “This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by [...]

Maths is fascinating. These days we see it as value-free beyond social concepts. I could write a number like 46587612165684612, but even if that number has never been written before in history people would think it odd for me to claim I invented it. In western thought 46587612165684612 has always existed, even if no-one has [...]