#ancient science

[retroreverbs]

We Are Not the First: Riddles of Ancient Science by Andrew Tomas (1971). Jacket design by Brian Paine.

[oof-its-me]

Archaeology is modern necromancy:

But instead of raising the dead to use them to fight (or any other droll activity), we raise them to ask them questions and receive nonverbal answers. Then—should we be so kind—we bury them again (as the dead should stay buried and be allowed their peace). Thought not before we take their photos and their secrets and recreate their bodies and ornaments to be remembered on by those of us while we remain living. Which is as beautiful and fascinating as it is morbid

Food for thought~

[radwaegy92-blog]

Ancient Egypt was millennia ahead of its time in medical discoveries that baffled even modern scientists.

The Ancient Egyptians uncovered schistosomiasis thousands of years before "Theodor Bilharz".

The name "Pharmacy" as we know it today traces its roots back to Ancient Egypt, The Ancient Egyptians called it "Pharmaca," a name that evolved into the modern "Pharmacy".

For more information 👇

[c-schroed]

Last week, I visited a gorgeous museum dedicated to a bronze age artifact called the Nebra Sky Disc. And my absolute favourite exhibit there was this reconstruction of the original version of this 3600 years old depiction of the night sky:

I love it because it has a plain and simple, but utterly important use: It's a perfectly simple depiction of a rule to determine when a leap month is needed to synchronize lunar and solar calendar (an important thing to do for e.g. all of one's agricultural needs).

For this, you have to watch the Pleiades stars (the cluster of seven stars between the two moon phases on the disk). In autumn they can always be seen alongside the full moon while in spring they can either be seen alongside a very thin crescent moon or, every three years, alongside a slightly thicker waxing crescent moon. And that's the rule depicted here:

If the crescent moon is thicker than the years before, add an extra month to the year.

It's simple. It's beautiful.

But that's not the final form of the Nebra Sky Disc. Over the course of some generations, people added. So. Much. Stuff:

Stripes on the rim to mark where the sun rises and sets on solstices. That's something that was known for centuries already at that time. The Goseck Circle not far away from Nebra did this job for at least a thousand years!

A little boat at the bottom, representing a mythological sun ship. Please mind that before this, the sky disc did not seem to bear any religious meaning. It seemingly was tool, nothing more and nothing less.

The rim was pinched with about 40 little holes, presumably to hang the disk up like a banner.

Finally, the disk was purposely damaged in some kind of funeral ceremony. To put it to rest.

I am so very fascinated by this. There was this tool, which served one specific use, and it perfectly understood the assignment. But over time, more and more features were added, which increasingly distracted from the original purpose. Until most people might even have forgotten about it (after all, it changed from a scientific tool to a religious symbol).

To me, personally, this is a perfect little example of enshittification. I stood there, in that museum, looking at the reconstruction of this marvellous artifact, imagining some bronze age guy being annoyed about what happened to the once so cool sky disc.

And gosh. I never ever felt so close to a (hypothetical) person that died 3600 years before my life time.

[crwn-lore]

With exams done and another term wrapped up, I’ve managed to take a solid 10 days off before I’m already itching to dive into something—learn something.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you see it), I won’t be hitting the books for another four months because I’m starting my first co-op soon! It’s a basic administrative role for an English learning program. And no exams in sight for a while, which I can’t say I’ll miss.

Come May, I’ll jump back into school, and I’m really looking forward to:

Classical Mechanics and Special Relativity: Newtonian dynamics of particles and systems, oscillations, gravity and central forces, Lorentz transformations, and relativistic dynamics.

Quantum Mechanics I: The formalism of quantum physics, operators, quantization, waves, particles, the uncertainty principle, and the Schroedinger equation for one-dimensional problems.

But until then, any suggestions for ways I can casually indulge in physics, cosmology, philosophy, or even ancient science? Podcasts, books, fun projects—I’m all ears!

[ritish16]

Satya Loka, Tapa. Loka, Jana Loka, Mahar Loka, Svar Loka, Bhuvar Loka, Bhur Loka and Aatala, Vitala, Sutala, Taratala, Mahatala, Rasatala, Paatala loka. Sarva Loka poojitha ekaika deva, devara deva Mahadeva.

[classicalshorts]

A reminder that the first theory of heliocentricity was formulated over two thousand years ago.

Aristarchus of Samos and the Heliocentric Model of the Universe

Almost two thousand years before Copernicus, Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric model of the universe. Unfortunately, Aristarchus’

[jeannereames]

Hello, Dr. Reames! I was wondering if you happened to have a post where you describe medicine in ancient Greece and in the Middle East lands that Alexander conquered during his time, their difference and what use did he do of that knew knowledge. As far as I know, middle east medicine was more advance that Greece's, but of course I'm not an expert and I might be wrong. Could you explain this topic a little further, please? Thank you in advance, I hope you're having a great week!

Medicine in the Ancient World

I have not really done any posts on ancient medicine, although I did do one that involved the way humors were understood to affect personality. Medicine is not an area where I have a specific specialty except the general way we all do. (I teach on it for my Intro to Greek History, for instance. I also teach a bit on ANE medicine in the ANE class.)

*So right upfront, let me suggest some books of interest:

Ancient Medicine, 2nd ed., Vivian Nutton, 2012, Routledge: If I had to give you a low-cost place to begin, this would be it. Broad overview of medicine in the ANE and Med basin, as really, these are a continuum.

Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World, Paul Keyser & John Scarborough, eds., 2022, Oxford UP: This just came out, a bit pricier in paperback, but is a longer text and covers more than just medicine. These companions and handbooks are useful because you get potted summaries of “the state of the field” on various topics under the broader umbrella. ALSO, it’s not just Greece and Rome, despite the title. Includes Mesopotamia, Egypt, as well as India and China.

*Alas, now we jump up to books over $100, so look for them in libraries:

Ancient Greek Medicine in Questions and Answers Diagnostics, Didactics, Dialectics, Michiel Meeusen, 2020, Brill (why it’s so pricey): This is on the academic side of things, looking at language and how medicine fit into the wider world of Greek philosophy.

Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman Medicine, Manfred Horstmanshoff & Marten Stol, 2004, Brill: Examines how religious and magical thinking wove its way through medicine of various places and periods. Again, on the academic side.

*Finally, books specifically on women and medicine, in Greece, and in Rome:

Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Ancient Greece, Nancy Demand, 1994, Johns Hopkins UP: An oldie but goodie. Demand used the Hippocratic Corpus (et al.) to examine the lives of women in Greece, and how (badly) Greeks understood the female body. (Link to the hardcover as it’s cheaper, used.) I regularly use this in my classes.

Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen, Rebecca Flemming, 2001, Oxford UP: As the title suggests, the focus is on how medical knowledge shaped Roman conceptions of womanhood…and how Roman conceptions of womanhood shaped medical thought.

I also note, with some trepidation, the work on women and medicine by Holt Parker. Medicine is among the things he specializes in, and his scholarship is solid. But he was convicted of child pornography (see this very good Eidolon article). It was quite the shocker. I met him in 2010 at the Missouri Valley History Conference here in Omaha, and he seemed like a perfectly nice guy. Just goes to show what people may be hiding. I won’t link to any of his books that might give him royalties, just his academia.edu page, where his work is free. I’m always a bit at sea in cases like this. His scholarship is excellent and should be mentioned, but he turned out to be a horrible excuse for a human being.

Some general observations:

Roman medicine is Greek medicine, and Greek medicine is Mesopotamian medicine, modified. There is a direct line of development. The oldest pharmacology in the west comes from the middle bronze age in Babylon, and Mesopotamia assembled medical treatises that systematically recorded what was known about various illnesses not long after, although the largest collection we have are Sargonid Neo-Assyrian (late iron age).

In Mesopotamia, there was a distinct “spiritual” (magical/divine) element to medicine. So the asu and ashipu often worked together. The asu was a physician, and ashipu is often translated as exorcist. Spiritual advisor might be more appropriate. Together, they would try to determine not just how to treat the illness, but the cause of it, which was generally attributed either to sin, or to curses from others. However “silly” that may sound today, we might think of it as a holistic approach, treating the whole person, not just the physical body.

Another fun detail about Mesopotamian doctors: after “medical school,” they served a “residency” of sorts under a senior physician before being allowed to hang out their own shingle.

Greeks of Asia Minor and the islands, being in much closer contact with inner Mesopotamia (both by trade and as mercenaries serving in Assyrian armies), picked up on their medicine and adapted it. There were two primary schools on Kos/Cos and Knidos/Cnidos, one based on prognostication, the other on diagnostics. Because the ancients understood the body so badly, the diagnostic school tended to be wrong more often than right, so the prognostic school on Kos won out in the long run.

Yes, that’s Hippokrates’s home. And yes, the Hippokratic Corpus gets its basis from earlier Mesopotamian, although it’s not just a copy. Also, the corpus as we have it isn’t just Hippokrates, but included a lot of later material down into the Hellenistic period (and may also have included older material).

Hippokrates took (at least some of) the religion out of medicine. He began to focus on the physical body apart from notions of sin and demonic possession. In short, he applied the rising trend of CRITICAL REASONING to medicine. This much larger movement that began with Thales and Friends introduced an entirely new way of sifting information and examining the world. Medicine borrowed it. (So did history, resulting in Herodotos.) Hippokrates's students followed in the same vein.

But religion in medicine was still quite popular all over Greece, and more traditional medical approaches mostly absorbed the new ideas of Hippokrates rather than seeing them as a challenge. Temples to Asklepios became the “hospitals” of the ancient world, their priests trained physicians. Hippokrates himself worked in the Asklepion in Kos, the home of his school. So rational medicine was still combined with treatments such as “incubations,” wherein the sick person would sleep in the temple and receive a dream. The priest-physician would hear the dream, hear the symptoms, and prescribe a cure, which often included some religious elements too, such as sacrifices, etc. Again, we might think on this as a holistic approach.

Physicians also traveled. Apart from these major temple centers, as you can imagine, their skill varied a good deal. In addition, they had midwives and herbalists, and, yes, female physicians too by the Hellenistic age. (For those who read Dancing with the Lion, Myrtale/Olympias is a trained herbalist and midwife, and in a scene involving Hephaistion’s injury, her medicine is presented as working better than the physician’s.)

Finally, there were surgeons, who traveled with armies. The job of a surgeon was different. Physicians (mostly) didn’t engage in surgery. Hence the line in the original Hippocratic Oath: “I will neither cut nor kill.” Surgeons did both (the latter as mercy).

If Greek medicine really came into its own in the late Archaic and Classical eras (yes, it pre-existed Hippokrates), it got a big boost in the Hellenistic era with all the new science brought back via Alexander’s conquests from Mesopotamia, but also India too, plus the co-mingling of Greek knowledge with Egyptian in Alexandria. The Romans absorbed it. Even in Rome, Greeks remained the best doctors well into late antiquity. Even the early medieval period, Byzantine (Greek) doctors were prized. Then came the leaps and bounds during the golden age of Islam in Bagdad, and the work of Al-Razi and Ibn-Sina (Avicenna), who built on Greek medicine.

So medical knowledge came out of Mesopotamia, into Greece and the west, then passed back into Mesopotamia, in terms of advancements.