Posts tagged Greeks
Planning Temples
Jun 6th
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 a book, I mean more next to a book. The plans are massive and held in a case next to the original book, which is equally large. The plans are in fact so large that I can’t photocopy many of them on an A3 photocopier. They’re really beautiful even more so than usual for me as they had north arrows, but I’ll get to that.
I’ll be honest they’re also a little odd. As I said the plans are large. One is so large is doesn’t fit onto one sheet, and so there’s an addition slip of paper to attach to the bottom. It seems Koldewey worked to scale, but either he or his printer didn’t grasp that scales are scalable. Hence the plan of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the largest ancient Greek temple, is slightly larger than A1 in size.
So anyway if they’re so wonderful and More >
Greek Months
Apr 3rd
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 different calendars.
The list is not to be taken too seriously. I have doubts about some of these correlations. The standard assumption is that various calendars start at either a solstice or an equinox. Therefore every calendar can be portrayed as the equivalent of the Athenian calendar +n months. I don’t agree with that at the moment, but I need to prove it and this is a handy crib sheet to start from. The months are all on lunar calendars, so there’s certainly no neat correlation with modern months. The month of Hekatombaion in Athens could, I think start as early as mid-June and end as late as mid-August, though it would only be around thirty days in any one year.
The months that start the year are in bold.
Gregorian Athens Sparta Delphi Gela June / August Hekatombaion Gakinthios / Hekatombeis Apellaios Panamos July / September Metageitnion Heriaos Boukatios Dalios August More >Archimedes
Jul 26th
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 much more honest than me. I’d have made sure my panel of experts knew exactly what was going to be revealed so they could coo appreciatively and say something useful to the webcam.
The press-centre links to several sites on the subject. I’d particularly recommend Reviel Netz’s The Origins of Mathematical Physics: New Light on an Old Question, from Physics Today. He’s a very imaginative thinker. He’s not simply good at mathematics, but can also pose interesting social questions on maths.
One paper he’s written is Greek Mathematicians: A Group Picture. He poses the question, if we were to take a group photograph of ancient Greek mathematicians, what would it look like? Some of the answers are a bit obvious perhaps, they’d be overwhelmingly male. But how many? Perhaps not as many as you might think. He gives evidence that Archimedes struggled to find anyone to send his results to, who More >
Antikythera Mechanism
Jun 7th
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 still know very little about the mechanism that you can’t pick up from the newspapers. If I get time I’ll read round the subject for autumn, but it’s one of those things which is very odd. Even being able to read it might not solve many questions about its use. Or maybe it will. The publication will have more info.
There’s also an official page from X-Tek, the people doing the scanning and an official website for the project which has an animation of the mechanism.
Beyond that there’s nothing I can say that Wikipedia doesn’t say already. No photo either because there’s nothing on a CC licence and my own photos, if I could find them, are so blurred they give me a headache. I hadn’t worked out how to focus inside glass cases when I took them.
Update: There’s now the press release and some comments on the letter in Nature on line.
More >Desperately seeking constellations? Part III
Apr 2nd
This is the final post on the topic till Thursday. Following advice in the comments, I’ve put up this diagram on the Slooh forum which should have some eager amateur astronomers. I don’t know what the feedback will be like, so I’ve decided to put up the poll here too. If the poll is active then over on the right you should see the an astronomical graffito from Pithekoussai. If you’re familiar with constellations then I’d appreciate it if you could select the most likely constellation from the options given. You’re welcome do discuss what you think it is, but I’d be grateful if you vote before you read the comments as I’d like your opinion, rather than your opinion of someone else’s opinion.
On Thursday morning I’m giving the talk at NAM, and the plan is to hyperlink to this site and the Slooh site to see if there’s an obvious winner. I have a growing feeling it’s going to torpedo my pet theory which might make the concluding comments interesting. Sadly you won’t get to see my embarrassment, but there is a consolation. You’ll be able to see a version on the web from midday Thursday.
Natalie Bennett asked why aren’t More >
Non-scientific astronomy in ancient Greece
Mar 16th
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 month the article is The Bowl of Night and it’s a brilliant example of what I’d like to do if Ed Krupp wasn’t doing it better and before me on a regular basis. This month’s article looks at the relationship between three constellations, the Crow, the Cup and Hydra. The tale of the constellations is that the crow was sent by Apollo to fetch water, but instead of coming straight back he delayed a while to wait for some figs to ripen. The crow blamed Hydra for the delay, but Apollo knew this to be a lie, so punished the crow by causing him to thirst while the figs ripen. The connection is that the Cup which carries the water, was obscured by the glare of the Sun in ancient Greece between August and September. When it returns to the morning sky, refilled, it brings with it More >
Early settlement in Agrigento
Feb 22nd
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. (more…)
Where was ancient Greece?
Dec 8th
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. Euboea, an island close to Athens starts sending out waves of settlers. The set up a colony on the shores of Syria at a site now known as Al Mina (Boardman 1990). This is followed by the establishment of other far flung colonies. Near what is now modern Naples, the Euboeans settled the colony of Pithekoussai. Other colonies followed on the toe of Italy and on Sicily on the opposite side of the Straits of Messina. Other cities sent out other settler and colonies sprung up along the shores of the Black Sea as far away as Georgia and on the shores of France and Spain. Both modern Marseilles and Ampurias are built on Greek foundations.
These were not ventures into pristine territories. In every case there were already indigenous populations. The nature of relationships between the Greeks and the Natives is a contentious issue. It More >
Isn’t Anaximander Wonderful?
Aug 3rd
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 the barbarians, not lose their glory…”
Unfortunately Herodotus, whose history is the earliest that survives, was writing a couple of centuries too late to record Anaximander and that’s shame. From the scant information that does survive Anaximander may be one of the all-time greats of science, up there with Newton, Darwin and Einstein. Unlike Archimedes or Pythagoras none of his ideas remain in use in science today, but his achievement is that he is arguably the man whose work made science possible.
There are plenty of reasons to like Anaximander. One is that he should be a very easy philosopher to be an expert on. Only two fragments of what appear to be his own words survive.
1. ‘Immortal and indestructible,’ ‘surrounds all and directs all.’ 2. ‘(To that they return when they are destroyed) of necessity; for he says that they suffer punishment and give satisfaction More >
What came first Addition or Multiplication?
Jun 13th
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 observed it, between 46587612165684611 and 46587612165684613. It can’t be destroyed, broken or damaged. It’s existed from the start of time and will continue to exist to the end of the universe as it is today. Perfect and uncorrupted. Which is a very Platonic idea, and that’s a problem if you dealing with cultures which didn’t have a Plato, like the Greeks before the fourth century BC.
A lot of thought on numbers requires assumptions which we don’t even acknowledge existing. A problem I’ve been thinking about for a while is the origin of mathematical operations. Which came first addition or multiplication? It would seem to be a no brainer, but it’s not. Clive is not entirely happy with this and it still needs a lot of work but it’s a problem worth thinking about. Why do we use mathematical operations? This first came to me while More >
