Archaeological Find Supports Ancient Greek Explorer’s Account of Britons

The Greek Reporter ^ | August 26, 2023 | Paula Tsoni

[SunkenCiv]

Pytheas of Massalia was the first-ever Mediterranean to reach and explore Great Britain and the Arctic Circle.

He is believed to have traveled as far as Iceland, becoming the first person on record to describe the midnight sun and the first known scientific visitor to see and describe the Celtic and Germanic tribes.According to Henry Fanshawe Tozer, Pytheas' voyage to the north took place at about 330 BC, derived from three main sources. Sadly, his original writings, titled On The Ocean, did not survive, but he is quoted in the works of later geographers, such as Strabo's Geographica, Pliny's Natural History and Diodorus of Sicily's Bibliotheca historica.

Pytheas most likely crossed the English Channel and first reached Britain from the coast of what is modern-day Cornwall, where he described the flourishing trade of tin, before he continued north along the west coasts of what are now England, Wales and Scotland.

There, he described the area's inhabitants, a Celtic-speaking people whom he called the Pretani, which would translate as "the painted ones." This could be the name that these very people called themselves, or the name in which their neighbours described them.

Despite the thousands of years between the estimated period of use of the ritual site in Carlisle where the ochre fragments were discovered, and Pytheas' voyage, previous finds in other parts of the U.K. suggest that red ochre continued to be used by prehistoric Britons until at least the Iron Age, which could bring the body painting habit closer in time to the so-called classical antiquity and Pytheas' account of the people of the Prettanike.

[SunkenCiv]

Contrary to myth, Julius Caesar didn’t burn the Great Library. He was holed up in the Alexandrian citadel area, and that’s where the library was. The other old name for it was The Ships’ Library, since the collection was started by the port officials searching incoming vessels for books (scrolls), taking them to Ptolemy’s posse of librarians, who copied them in short order, and returned the copies to the ships. In Caesar’s “Civil War”, he describes how he sent out what we’d call commandos to set fire to the enemy ships in the harbor, and the fire spread in one spot to a warehouse at dockside and like ships, it was destroyed, along with “some books which chanced to be there”.

The Library continued to exist and grow throughout the rest of Roman and Byzantine times. When the muzzies conquered Alexandria, the Caliph ordered it destroyed, without looking over the collection, because if any books had information contrary to the Koran, they were heretical, and if they agreed with the Koran, they were superfluous.

[21twelve]

I had always heard it was the muslims that burned the library.