Posted on 06/11/2019 10:22:25 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Pytheas was a contemporary of Aristotle and Alexander the Great. He reached the Arctic Circle in his search for new sources of tin (essential for the making of bronze) and amber (usually sourced from the German coast) around 330 to 325 BC...
As Pytheas continued his journey north along Britain's west coast he came across Ireland and rounded the tip of Scotland. At that point in his journey, he learned of an island situated further north at a distance of six days sailing which he refers to as "Thule" (most probably Iceland).
Geminus of Rhodes (1st century BC) quoting directly the accounts of Pytheas (On the Ocean) provides us with the following interesting description: " The Barbarians showed us the place where the sun sets. For it happened that in these parts the night becomes extremely short, sometimes two, sometimes three hours long, so that the sun rises a short while after sunset."
Pytheas provides a description of the midnight sun a phenomena that only occurs above the Arctic circle "a land where at the solstice the night no longer exists"'. He also refers to the existence of any icy slush which could not be traversed on foot nor by boat".
Pytheas was the first to use the word Brettaniki (BRETTANIKH) to describe Britain; to name Thule and describe the midnight sun. Also during his voyage, he gathered data regarding the astronomical and geographical determinations of the elevations of the sun, the lengths of the days and tides. He also correctly observed that the north star is not true north.
(Excerpt) Read more at historydisclosure.com ...
bringing interesting topics to a 24/7 Hate Trump world
Thanx
I found this post and discussion thread so interesting I just ordered Cunliffe’s book on Pytheas. As one commenter noted this is a pleasant change from all of the anti-Trump acrimony we have to confront every day.
Thanks, I've been trying to think up a pretext to get myself on that show.
Well said. Add to that the small amount of freeboard, particularly in rough seas (and give or take a heavier cargo), they were crossing seas in vessels none of us would use to cross the crick. :^)
Plato's description of the "shoal mud" beyond the Pillars of Hercules -- leftover crud from the sinking of Atlantis, sez Plato -- sounds like something taken from the Phoenicians/Carthaginians (rumors spread to keep competitors out of the Atlantic). Tin mining in Cornwall is quite ancient; even if that were the only place it was being mined, the whole archipelago could have been named after that activity.
At the time, Kochab was the star nearest the North Pole, and it was farther from the pole than Polaris is now.
Columbus gathered information in Iceland regarding the western lands, which were known about by Icelanders and other Scandinavians (and obviously the rumors had made their way around Europe). There are a couple of known Viking sites in Canada (plus some others in northern N.America which are not necessarily generally accepted) and the surviving saga material.
Iceland was also settled prior to Viking settlements, probably by Irish monks, although it sounds like they'd given up and left, or merely died out.
And thousands of years ago the Maritime Archaic ("Lost Red Paint People") appear to have settled all 'round the Arctic coastlines, leaving similar stone markers which appear to have indicated safe places for landfall. One researcher has apparently suggested that the Red Paints didn't erect the stones, but figured out their significance, and that the markers are much older, placed by an earlier circumpolar culture.
The Maritime Archaic, Palaeoeskimo, and Na-Dene speakers (although the Inuit/Eskimo groups isn't genetically related to the Beothuk in eastern Canada) arrived in succession, each having a period of dominance, but culturally distinct from one another, and each supplanting the previous group, with possible survivals in pockets here and there.
Naturally, any model that indicates that humans who live by spearing various aquatic life are good enough with boats that they can cross a fairly narrow strait causes high blood pressure, incoherent rants, and other symptoms among the landlubbers who will defend Clovis-first-and-only until everyone with any sense is tossing a symbolic handful of soil onto their interments.
Thanks for the kind remarks!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Fascinating mention of Scylax, right in Herodotus, I don't think I'd noticed it before.
Of the greater part of Asia Darius was the discoverer. Wishing to know where the Indus (which is the only river save one that produces crocodiles) emptied itself into the sea, he sent a number of men, on whose truthfulness he could rely, and among them Scylax of Caryanda, to sail down the river. They started from the city of Caspatyrus, in the region called Pactyica, and sailed down the stream in an easterly direction to the sea. Here they turned westward, and, after a voyage of thirty months, reached the place from which the Egyptian king, of whom I spoke above, sent the Phoenicians to sail round Libya. After this voyage was completed, Darius conquered the Indians, and made use of the sea in those parts. Thus all Asia, except the eastern portion, has been found to be similarly circumstanced with Libya.
The Histories of Herodotus, Book IV, Melpomene, tr by George Rawlinson
Before Pytheas, the pharaoh commissioned the circumnavigation of Africa, and as with Pytheas midnght sun and shoals of ice, a detail is preserved, even though Herotodus didn't believe it -- that the Sun was "upon their right hand" -- which of course is exactly what they would have seen, and no one would have just made a lucky guess of that detail. The circumnavigation was real.
As for Libya, we know it to be washed on all sides by the sea, except where it is attached to Asia. This discovery was first made by Necos, the Egyptian king, who on desisting from the canal which he had begun between the Nile and the Arabian gulf, sent to sea a number of ships manned by Phoenicians, with orders to make for the Pillars of Hercules, and return to Egypt through them, and by the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians took their departure from Egypt by way of the Erythraean sea, and so sailed into the southern ocean. When autumn came, they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited until the grain was fit to cut. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not till the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyage home. On their return, they declared -- I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may -- that in sailing round Libya they had the sun upon their right hand. In this way was the extent of Libya first discovered.
The Histories of Herodotus, Book IV, Melpomene, tr by George Rawlinson
At least a couple more exist, one is the Periplus of the Erythaean Sea (the Indian Ocean), the other being the Periplus of Hanno, which details Carthaginian colonies planted along the western coast of Africa, and exploration at least down to Mt Cameroon (the active volcano was in eruption and described in the text) and a bit further south, where a gorilla type specimen was taken and its skin tacked up as an offering in the temple in Carthage where the account was seen and recorded by a Greek traveler.
The “dark ages” is a myth thought up by Gibbon and other 1700 and 1800 authors who blamed christianity for the fall of Rome
They forgot that
1. Scientific discoveries still continued by monks etc. until the Arabic conquests cut off North Africa from Christian civilization
2. The Eastern Empire didn’t fall until 1453 and continued development
There were no “Dark Ages” - there was a slight interregnum between 451 and the Carolingian renaissance in 800 AD but the knowledge was never “lost” - the Eastern Empire kept it. In fact we shouldn’t even call it the “Eastern Empire” - it called itself the Roman Empire
The Western Empire was due to fall under the onslaught of the Germans, but even these Germanic peoples were content to keep the structure below the same and just skim off the top - why kill the golden goose?
The real delay was islam.
Even in the Roman Empire of the 7th and 8th centuries they still were convulsed in philosophical discussions rather than practical science.
The real push for scientific development was the breakdown in the Western world - with competing countries competing with each other for more discoveries.
The period erroneously called the Dark ages was not “also called the Migration period” — the Migration period coincided with the first half, but was not fully coinciding.
The migration period technically started back in 300 BC with the Celtic groups migrating south and east - like the Gallic sack of Rome, the Galatians advancing into Rome and setting up their kingdom in Galatia.
The Germanic peoples were moving south from the Jutland area starting from the 100s AD and that continued until technically the Viking period (8th century).
The Magyar came in the 9th century — the Avars, Bulgars preceded them.
The Migration period didn’t prompt the Middle Ages as much as the islamic conquests did
I think the people who suffered through the nearly 1000 years of the dark ages might differ if they had known what had been lost after Rome and how much more dismal their existence was as a result. It is literally true that human beings in Western Europe lived better in the Roman Empire then they did at least until the 19th century. The water was pure, the sanitation was better, diet was more varied and there was clearly less anarchy. There was Roman law and a common language. The squalor, barbarity, insularity and insecurity of the dark ages truly made life nasty, brutish and short.
The Carolingian Renaissance was very short-lived, expiring almost with its namesake.
I take your point that the knowledge was not lost, it was however precariously tucked away in Rocky crags along the Atlantic coast and, to some degree, in the Eastern Empire and in Islam until destroyed in Alexandria.
I take your point as well about the dark influences of Islam. The argument is that the Pirates of Islam shut down all commerce on the Mediterranean and so pitched northern Europe into a catastrophic depression as it extinguished virtually all Mediterranean commerce.
I think this is probably true, although I am not thoroughly educated on the subject and especially ignorant about the gap of at least 200 or 300 years between the fall of Rome and the conquests of the Mediterranean by Islam beginning no earlier than 620 A.D.
I would like to have your thoughts on this as well as the rest of my propositions.
Thanks Styria. The star has a planet around it as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Ursae_Minoris#As_the_pole_star
The "Dark Ages" were actually pagan in character -- the relatively massive waves of new settlement and carving out of fiefs all over western Europe, including the entire British archipelago was pretty much all pagan. The pagan "Dark Ages" began before the "fall of Rome" in the west and ended at different times in different places. I think the "Dark Ages" as visualized by Gibbon was more about being an Anglophile than about anything else.
The eastern Roman Empire had its ups and downs, but lost all authority over western Europe after one of its peaks, under Justinian. That died of too many taxes and the Plague.
The other day an article about a new breakdown of the strains of plague in Europe caught my eye, now I can't find it. Now, back to the real post...
OTOH, in the late 50s to mid-60s, the dig at Cadbury in England turned up a large "Dark Ages" settlement, post-Roman, but with artifacts that had resulted from trade with the Roman world. Same has been found in other sites in Britain, including Tintagel (once someone got around to doing serious work there).
European feudal society was more like than unlike the society of Rome, but got stuck in a system with very little upward mobility, ruled by a hereditary hierarchy.
The Renaissance arrived because of the 14th c outbreaks of the Plague, which destroyed so many of the traditional practices -- labor became valuable to the laborer; the practice of law became more systematized; trade became more wide open; national identity and ethnic consolidation rose to dominance; and my personal favorite, the use of gunpowder completely changed warfare -- and private lending (which was all that Rome had ever had, apparently it worked fine) transformed into what we'd call international banking, led by the Medicis, who also bankrolled the artistic and scientific renaissance in Italy.
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