Interesting. I'd heard of it before, but wasn't aware of the number of things it would calculate. Makes you wonder how much knowledge was lost when they torched the library at Alexandria.
The single greatest crime in history was the burning of the library at Alexandria. It alone is enough to completely invalidate Christianity as a proper system of worship.
Scientists Unravel Mystery of Ancient Machine. AOL News, 12/03/06 By NICHOLAS PAPHITIS, AP Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! "A team including British, Greek and U.S. scientists used specially developed X-ray scanning and imaging technology to analyze the corroded bronze, revealing hidden machinery and a form of written user's manual. "We have used the latest technology available to understand this mechanism, yet the technological quality in this mechanism puts us to shame," project leader Mike Edmunds, professor of astronomy at Cardiff University. "If the ancient Greeks made this, what else could they do?" He spoke at a two-day conference that opened in Athens on Thursday. The team's findings also were published in Nature magazine. Known as the Antikythera Mechanism - from the island off which the Roman ship sank - the assemblage of cogs and wheels looks like the innards of a very badly maintained grandfather clock. But the first clockwork devices appeared more than a thousand years later in Western Europe. "It was a pocket calculator of the time," said John Seiradakis, a professor of astronomy at the University of Thessaloniki who served on the international team. Ever since its discovery a century ago, the complex mechanism has baffled scientists. Edmunds said the 82 surviving fragments, dated to between 140-100 B.C, contain more than 30 gear wheels, and "are covered with astronomical, mathematical and mechanical inscriptions." "It was a calendar of the moon and sun, it predicted the possibility of eclipses, it showed the position of the sun and moon in the zodiac, the phase of the moon, and we believe also it may have shown the position of some of the planets, possibly just Venus and Mercury," he said. The box-shaped mechanism - the size of office paper and operated with a hand-crank - could predict an eclipse to a precise hour on a specific day. The new study of the ancient device, with the aid of Hewlett Packard and the British X-ray equipment maker X-Tek, more than doubled the amount of the inscriptions readable on the mechanism. "We will not yet be able to answer the question of what the mechanism was for, although now we know what the mechanism did," Edmunds said. His fellow team member, Xenophon Moussas, an associate professor of space physics at Athens University, speculated that the device could have been used for navigation at sea or for mapmaking. The first comparable devices known in the West were clockwork clocks developed during the Middle Ages. Nature magazine suggested that the know-how for these mediaeval clocks may have reached Europe from the east after the fall of Baghdad - capital of a highly cultured, prosperous Islamic state - to the Mongols in the 13th century.The Antikythera device was probably made on the island of Rhodes, which had a long tradition in astronomy and applied mechanics. The ship, which sank in the first century B.C. and is thought to have been carrying plunder from Roman-conquered Greece to Rome, is believed to have sailed from Rhodes. The wreck was found in 1900 by Greek sponge-divers 164 feet deep and just off the small island of Antikythera, on what is still a busy trade route between southern mainland Greece and Crete.
I'll second that. History - or rather, the future - would have been accelerated extremely faster if it weren't for that. And can you imagine where we'd be right now.
Valich: I'd wager that we'd be a millennia more advanced if neither the Dark Ages nor the Burning of the Library of Alexandria took place. 300 if only one did.
It wasn't Christians who did that, it was Muslims. It's generally attributed to the forces of Caliph Omar of Baghdad. Christians still get credit for obliterating two of the Earth's six original civilizations (Olmec/Maya/Aztec and Inca) so let the Muslims have their credit for one. Taken in aggregate the score is Civilization 3, Abrahamic religion 3. Kind of makes you wonder why any rational civilization would actually protect freedom of religion.
Fraggle Rocker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophilus_of_Alexandria They also lynched the finest woman to ever have lived: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia
There is a growing body of scholarly writing to the effect that "the Dark Ages" is hyperbole. They claim that Europe did not really collapse into an era of marked ignorance and squalor after the fall of the Roman Empire, and that the rate of progress in the early centuries of the second millennium appears to be low only because we compare it to the rate after the quantum increase of the Renaissance and Enlightment, not to the rate prior to Rome's fall. I've also seen doubt that the burning of Alexandria was either complete or accomplished in a single act of arson, allowing a good many of the documents to survive. Furthermore, just because printing had not yet been invented did not mean that there was only one single copy of every written work in existence. Copying works by hand was a venerable tradition. Nonetheless, some of the squalid details of the Dark Ages appear to be both genuine and products of Christianity. The prohibition of bathing and the discrediting of the healing wisdom of old women, for example. Then, as now, women had a longer life expectancy than men, and it was exacerbated by the nearly constant warfare. Most really old people in those days were female, so it was easy to spread the holy rumor that their missing teeth, wispy hair, wrinkly skin and iconoclastic attitude were telltale signs of witches rather than simply attributes of old age.
Seems strange they would destroy a library when at the time they were making rapid advances based on Greek literature and sciences. Its a pretty disputed topic anyway. http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/01122002/0112200252.htm
Also, it could mean that Christian savages have bought humanity an extra 1000 years to existPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! You never know.
There is a lot a debate on the subject. Evidence for either one being the culprit is scant and does not really hold up under close examination. Julius Caesar is another possible candidate. Unfortunately, documents alluding to the destruction of the library found so far are scant on detail, written by those with an axe to grind, be it political or religious, or written hundreds of years after the "event" itself. As Fraggle noted, it is not even known whether the Library was destroyed or broken up over several separate events rather than the single calamity often used as a story to further someone's purpose. It is entirely possible we'll never know who the real perpetrators were, or what happened to surviving manuscripts. However, from what I've read, the Caliph Omar is probably the least likely to have been the culprit. Christianity is often made a scapegoat for the destruction of ancient writings, but the simple fact is that without the monastries and churches hand-copying thousands of documents, its very likely that nothing of Western literature would have survived at all. Modern man owes some religions a great deal of debt in this regard.
You must admit though they were pretty picky about what they choose to Copy. If it didn't fit into there views it would of course be ignored or destroyed. The true nature of such libraries was I guess impartiality and the scribes of that time I would hasten to suggest are more than likely the students of tuition. Perhaps one of the cult religions of that time was the downfall, the one where people believed there was no life after death, just Oblivion where their entire purpose on the planet was just to enjoy themselves (Party and not work). Perhaps the Libraries were too much work for them.
Largely true, but then don't imagine hordes of monks sifting through thousands of documents choosing what to enscribe and what not to based on religious edict, either. Generally few documents came their way, and those that did were often manuscripts picked up by others and passed on - usually in the hope of trade or currying favour. When faced with the laborious task of copying out a large volume of work onto vellum, a monk is going to choose what interests him first - which should not be used as an argument against the monks themselves for being christian, its simply human nature. There is also very little evidence for large-scale destruction of manuscripts either - such incidents were documented because they were unusual, not because they happened frequently. It's quite an interesting subject really. For example, take the surviving knowledge we have of Greek literature in the present day. We have scientific and mathematical works, philosophical works... but, other than Homer, very little in the way of Greek comedies and plays we know existed. The impression we get from all of this is that the Greeks were a practical, scientific and philosophical lot - and yet we know next to nothing about what was important to the Greeks themselves, because all we have is what was copied by those who had access to greek manuscripts in the dark ages because it was important to them. Put simply, our knowledge of what the primary motivations and interests were to most Greeks has been formed not by the Greeks, but by those who copied Greek manuscripts. Just imagine - if some great calamity were to hit the earth in the near future, and researchers centuries later were to dig up the remains of London - they'd probably speculate on our knowledge of magic because among manuscripts found on hundreds of subjects, a significantly large proportion of those were copies of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.
what is you wish to know? surely extrapolating from the general human condition would fill in the blanks that you assume must exist due to biased and selective histories? one can also use archeology as a cross reference to validate shit or gain new insight into culture rest assured, my good man greek butt fucking was probably on par with modern man, if not superior
perhaps as an elder member of the Ancient Greek ButtFucker's Guild, i'll deign to throw you a bone... *it was important to drink blood thrice a day as we greeks were all alien vampires from NGC 2352346373. ...or two *the little boys were greased up with olive oil
