Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original
smithsonianmag.com64 points by bookofjoe 5 days ago
64 points by bookofjoe 5 days ago
For a bit of context, the Phaenomena was a book by Eudoxus (c. 400 BC) explaining the then-current knowledge of astronomy; unfortunately there are no extant copies. A poem (also called Phaenomena) by Aratus (c. 300 BC) made the content more accessible, and was extremely popular. The only surviving work by Hipparchus (c. 150 BC) is a critical commentary on these two books, and it only survived because it was bundled together with several other commentaries on Aratus' poem which were copied as a group. Hipparchus synthesized Mesopotamian astronomical observations and measurement techniques with Greek spherical geometry, founding the subject we now call trigonometry. All of his other works are lost, but much of the content of Ptolemy's Syntaxis (a.k.a. Almagest, c. 150 AD) was taken from Hipparchus' astronomical and mathematical works.
Any additional fragments of Hipparchus' works is of great interest to the history of mathematics and astronomy.
For those who don't know, star catalogs were basically GPS systems. With a calendar, sextant and an accurate catalog, you should be able to know where you are.
Apollo 13 astronauts used this method, works pretty well
If you're interested in the history of science and lost knowledge, you may enjoy the book entitled "The Swerve" by Greenblatt which is about similar discoveries of ancient codices in Europe--in particular "de Rerum Natura" by Lucretius.
Now here's an interesting thought: Would you have deduced that stars are distant suns if you'd lived in the ancient world?
Apparently the only pre-modern people (i.e. pre-Giordano Bruno) recorded as making the claim were Anaxagoras and Aristarchus of Samos [0], but their ideas were completely rejected by contemporaries.
In retrospect, it just seems so blindingly obvious that I'm tempted to believe that I too would have seen through the Aristotelean BS.
But surely there must be aspects of reality that will seem similarly obvious to future generations, and yet I don't feel any insights coming on.
I should say, Aristarchus is the ideal of maximizing information from minimal data:
>Aristarchus of Samos (Samos is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea) lived from about 310 to 230 BC, about 2250 years ago. He measured the size and distance of the Sun and, though his observations were inaccurate, found that the Sun is much larger than the Earth. Aristarchus then suggested that the small Earth orbits around the big Sun rather than the other way around, and he also suspected that stars were nothing but distant suns, but his ideas were rejected and later forgotten, and he, too, was threatened for suggesting such things
I don't think it should be obvious. If you could measure spectra, that would tell you that starlight and sunlight are the same, but you could still think they were very tiny suns that were near. You would need to measure parallax to know they were far away. Neither of these are possible without precision technology, though you could probably argue that it could have been done in ancient times with enough effort.
Maybe if the solar system had more than one star, or there were other stars very close, people would have caught on a lot quicker.
In science being right is nowhere close to enough, otherwise it's speculative fiction, a fairy tale, you have to provide convincing reasons, you have to demonstrate that you have considered alternative explanations (hypotheses) and after this process there remains one standing.
Sadly, Aristarchus's hunch was way ahead of his times and one could not convincingly explain the absence of screaming winds, absence of stellar paradox, could not convincingly explain why weights dropped from a height were not left behind as the Earth below spun away at fantastic speed.
In this duel of ideas I think the critics of Aristarchus's idea's were great scientists as measured by current standards, although they were wrong, they were wrong for the right reasons.
To add to this: I think that what appears to us to be stagnation in scientific interest was due to the fact that Ptolemaios was so brilliant. Contrary to popular belief, the empirical quality of his cosmology in terms of predictability was not surpassed by Copernicus, but only by Kepler about 100 years later.
There were some minor discrepancies, that bothered experts in the late middle ages, which let to Copernicus. But even he could not convincingly solve them. (In his theory the Sun is not at the center, but the mean Sun, as is the center of Ptolemaios deferent not exactly the Earth.)
With Ptolemaios, however, cosmology had stabilised to such an extent that the fundamental questions had found their answers and astronomers turned their attention to practical issues and refinements, such as calendars and the related problem of the very odd movements of the moon. (You need Newton and gravitation to solves this, more or less.)
I often wonder if Quantum Mechanics is a "Ptolomaic" understanding of the sub atomic world.
So first of all, I believe that St. Katherine of Alexandria's hagiographies are the personification of the mythical Library, especially because her monastery now boasts the largest collection of ancient papyrus and codices ever assembled. It is rather clear to me that the Sinai monastery is the actual successor, and that the vast majority of Alexandria's collection never burned at all. (The monastery also hosts Moses' burning bush and famously, a fire extinguisher is mounted next to it.) Muhammad himself ordered the sparing of the community during seige times.
That being said, I also believe that the ancients were well-aware that our Sun is a local star. And by extension, that stars are distant suns. I have been doing research on the Star of Bethlehem, and it is painfully, obviously clear that the Star sought by the Magi is the Sun itself, since when they met with Herod, they first described Springtime (late April through June) and then the Winter Solstice as they pursued the Sun to Bethlehem. Furthermore, anyone traveling for seven months, and only at night, in the ancient world, while bearing priceless treasures, would have been fools, unless they also carried torches, weapons, mercenaries, and medical supplies. Furthermore, any Hellenistic pagan reading the New Testament would've clearly discerned the identification of Jesus with the divine aspects of Phoebus Apollo (among other Olympians); the Sun metaphors continue to the present day. The Star of Bethlehem simply cannot be distant, dim, or anything but our own Sol.
Anyway, yeah, recently the descriptions of the large-scale copying at the Port of Alexandria has convinced me that the Library amassed a gigantic collection of knowledge and texts, and those were, for the most part, safely transferred "by angels" to Sinai when the time was right. And palimpsests notwithstanding, there are still tons of texts still unread, unindexed, and undiscovered in there.
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It's incredible what knowledge we'd have, if it weren't for Christianity and the Dark Ages it engendered. There are tons of palimpsests like this, like the Archimedes Palimpsest, in which the beginnings of calculus was invented, almost two millenia before Newton, but were scraped off to make yet another Bible. Imagine what the West could have accomplished if monks weren't so busy erasing science and math.
This is not a very historically informed comment. This didn’t take place during the “dark ages,” for one, but in a Christian monastery in Islamic Sinai if the timing of the article is correct. It’s a shame that some of these discoveries were overwritten but this was a common practice in any culture because paper was so expensive.
The writings of St. John Climacus were also far more useful and interesting to people at the time since they dealt with what for them were practical matters of how to lead the life of their community. This isn’t because they were narrow-mindlessly religious. Monks also had to busy themselves with calendrical calculations — and therefore astronomy. These were works of what we would call practical philosophy or ethics, like the famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It would also have been tragic to potentially lose those culturally significant writings in favor of astronomical or mathematical texts.
Also, to add to this - the "dark ages" were kind of a misnomer. The center of culture and science in the West packed up and moved from Rome to Constantinople. What we think of as the "dark ages" were really the "barbarian" tribes of Europe (starting with the Franks), slowly becoming educated and cultured within the shadow of the old Roman empire.
Also, the monks and scribes creating palimpsest were not thoughtless. In the West we enjoy a very wide collection of ancient texts specifically through the diligent work of making and distributing copies. They were remarkably literate and intentional in their work.
A lot of these palimpsest were not entire books, but fragments or loose pages that had built up over centuries and then bound and repurposed. They were not any more sentimental with them than you would be with a pile of old journals from a thrift shop. A collection of celestial observations done by the eye were certainly not of particular interest to them.
What if Hipparchus originally charted stars that no longer exist in our sky, due to having gone supernova hundreds of year ago? A thousand year time difference is roughly 1/3rd of a complete equinox precession, which would also be interesting to compare against our modern day observations.
All of this is valuable, both the cultural knowledge and the scientific. I doubt the monks realized the gravity of their choice so long ago.
I’m not saying it’s not unfortunate that things get lost just that we shouldn’t act like this was some kind of act of ignorant vandalism.
Oh they knew. They knew.
Okay just kidding, but also people stealing what they think are good ideas, discarding the rest, and passing off what is passed along as their own? Everyone does that. Anyone who says different is blind to their own behavior.
With a less negative attribution bias this process is called “learning”.
I prefer the phrase "adding value".
And let's take a moment to appreciate the word 'value', one of the true heavy lifters in the world of words.
> I doubt the monks realized the gravity of their choice so long ago.
I mean, the star chart was probably something equivalent to a text book for us. Many texts were uniquely preserved at St. Catherine's since they had Mohammed's letter of protection not to mention being a fortress in the middle of a desert.
At the time the monks probably thought it was a common enough text to not worry about.
> Christian monastery in Islamic Sinai if the timing of the article is correct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent
According to this article his writings pre-date the Islamic conquest (639).
Of course, there was also this: https://www.sinaimonastery.com/index.php/en/history/mohammed
And St Catherine's is a fortress in the middle of the desert so who knows what it's status was, it was an interesting time (beginning of Islamic conquests).
I find that view to be reductive and correspond to simplistic stereotypes of the European Middle Ages (e.g., calling them the "Dark Ages"). It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views, then blames the fact that their values are different then ours all on their religious beliefs (which, too, were varied).
This is not to say that tons of material was not lost, or only preserved in other places (e.g., Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East), but it ignores the learning and innovations of the medieval period (scientific, legal, theological, etc.), and of course the fact that so many classical texts were only preserved because of those monks copying them down.
I find that these reductive stereotypes are... actually true.
Not all the Middle Ages were really Dark, but some of them were.
> It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views
But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.
And sure, the Reformation was made possible by internal forces within the religious institutions, slowly building ideological foundation for it.
>> It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views
> But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.
1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious systems would vary drastically by place and time in Europe. The lifestyle and thoughts of an English peasent in 600CE would be drastically different from the lifestyle of a Spanish or Frankish one, and would differ even more so between 600CE and 900CE.
2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of traditional Roman lands.
3. The Reformation didn't start until the 16th century, long after the Dark Ages are considered to have ended. Generously you could say it started with the Hussites in the 1400s but that's still skipping over the Renaissance entirely which is the absolute latest end for the Dark Ages since the whole point of it as a historical context is "rediscovering" the Classical works.
> 1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious systems would vary drastically by place and time in Europe.
This is a non-answer. Yes, political systems were different. The ARE still different.
But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
> 2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of traditional Roman lands.
It should have started around the time of the move of the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.
If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.
> But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
Ireland is often cited as one such place, thanks to early Christian monasteries. The Carolingian Renaissance was significant in Central Europe, and there were important cultural developments in Slavic lands, though perhaps not involving 'science' as such.
> But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
That seems different from what you originally argued but either way, that's also not really accurate. I'm going to assume you're referring to "Western Europe" here since you're clearly aware of Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire still existing, but that still leaves Al-Andalus, the Carolingian Renaissance, agricultural advancements like the three-field system, wheelbarrows, multiple types of milling technology, and during the latter end you start getting advanced compasses, bells, mechnical watches, and other metallurgy.
Where all of these done in one or two specific places? No, continuing to ignore Byzantium here, but there was a still a variety of advancements happening all the time without which the Renaissance couldn't have happened.
> It should have started around the time of the move of the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.
I mean, you can think that but that's not how or what the term "The Dark Ages" usually refers to. It sounds like you have your own constructed time period in mind and I'm not interested in discussing something I'm not aware of.
> If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.
A very pointed date to choose.
> But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe.
No, it is not. As Stryan noted in another response to your comment, the idea that medieval Europe was somehow one uniform culture is incorrect.
I would also add that the term "Dark Ages" is used in different ways by different people. People who don't know much about the Middle Ages often use that term to describe the whole of the Middle Ages, from roughly the fifth century to the end of the fifteenth (and Christianity had already spread around the Roman Empire by the fifth). Others just the early Medieval period (about 500 to 1000). Some limit the term to periods where we just don't have many sources, or it is perceived that we don't (e.g., I've heard it applied to Visigothic Spain).
Fourteenth-century Humanists (who lived at a time often considered to be part of those so called "Dark Ages"!) first used the term to contrast what they thought were the centuries between their lives and the classical period. They even went so far as to emulate the handwriting of the classical texts they favored, thinking they should because that's how the Romans wrote. They didn't realize they were copying eighth- and ninth-century Carolingian hands instead, texts copied by monks and clerics and court scribes because they valued them. (Lower case letters in modern languages that use the Latin characters, like English, are still based on Carolingian minuscule.)
I'm pretty sure most people call them "Dark Ages" because during this time the speed of social and scientific development almost entirely stopped.
And mind you, I'm not saying that it stopped _completely_, but it slowed down to a crawl.
Recycling expensive media is a thing that was going on before the common era. Egyptian mummies were for instance wrapped in recycled papyrus. Look at the BBC wiping tapes, which when something is expensive to buy, economics can be the driver in erasing versus buying additional new media material. Even Neanderthals would recycle their expensive stone tools using the cores-on-flakes method to make smaller tools out of the old broken ones.
The so-called "Dark Ages" were not solely engendered by Christianity, and even the arguably negative characteristics of Christianity in late antiquity were ultimately shaped by prevalent outside factors and not inherent to the religion itself. It literally took many centuries for Roman civilization to collapse, and the root cause was that (like many ancient societies) it was basically predicated on plunder and conquest, so the whole arrangement began to collapse like a slow-motion trainwreck when they could not effectively plunder anymore.
There might have been some hope that it could gradually transition to a somewhat more modern style of economic development, but this was hindered by the Barbarian invasions especially of the Huns, so this whole dynamic only really took hold much later, in the Middle Ages.
In case you're wondering why you're being downvoted: the history is much more nuanced. While the Archimedes Palimpsest is a genuine and tragic example of lost text, the broader claim that Christianity engendered a period of scientific erasure is considered outdated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis).
For example, monasteries were the primary centers of literacy and education in Europe during the early middle ages, and they acted as the primary bridge for the survival of Greco-Roman intellectual heritage in the West. Not always intentionally, but they were the only sanctuary for books during those times.
Besides, this is not how history works. Civilizations come and go and times of transition always take a toll. An eye-opening recent book on these questions I can recommend is Tom Holland's "Doninion: The Making of the Modern World".
For anybody interested in the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52259619-dominion I would highly recommend. Holland (historian, not the actor) makes a great case about why many of our thoughts nowadays are rooted in Christianity.
It's disappointing to see the myth of the "Christian Dark Ages" still repeated so often.
It's true that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire led to a regression in social order. To blame this complex collapse entirely on Christianity is overly simplistic. There's obviously some casualties during this period of upheaval (like the Palimpsest you mentioned), but if anything the early Christian monasteries deserve some credit for preserving knowledge during this period of tremendous upheaval.
Many have also pointed out how Eurocentric this view is. Mathematics and science continued to flourish in Arabic and Chinese places of learning as well. Algebra, modern astronomy, and the printing press did not pop out of the aether the moment Europeans decided to start printing Greek gods again.
To me the difference is, there seems to have been way more freedom of thought in the pre christian societies. Polytheism is (usually) more open to new ideas than religios dogma of one god. This is for me what dark times means, and the age of enlightenment when it was possible again to dare to think in new directions and not be afraid of the inquisition anymore.
How to do real research, when you have to align every insight with some old book or face the stake? Only very restricted, in secrecy and not in open exchange.
So also in non christian societies people were killed for having the wrong ideas, but comparing greece or early rome with the christian empires, it seems obvious to me why progress was slowed down for so long.
Consider why the Roman public, commoners in particular but not exclusively, were so ready to abandon the religious beliefs of their forefathers and throw it all away, even defacing the old temples, to adopt some jewish desert hippie's promise of simple salvation. Perhaps you'd like to think this conversion of Rome was all by the sword, but in reality the early christian converts chose despite very credible threats of state violence, and the state itself only converted when the critical mass of common christians could no longer be denied or ignored.
Rome's culture and traditional was fundamentally broken; it no longer served the needs of the Roman people, and if Christianity hadn't popped up, it would have been some other system of reform instead. The status quo was unstable, rapidly deteriorating. You may idealize the religious tolerance of their polytheism, but what that matter if it isn't actually serving the spiritual needs of the people?
> To me the difference is, there seems to have been way more freedom of thought in the pre christian societies.
I see you're one of today's lucky 10,000! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletianic_Persecution#Great...
> Polytheism is (usually) more open to new ideas than religios dogma of one god.
This is a modern view with hindsight bias. In the ancient world, the existence of many gods did not imply peaceful co-existance, but very heated rivalry and politics.
Ironically pagan authors of late antiquity were the "conservatives" in our modern sense. Pagan literally means "farmer" - it might have similar implications to how we would call someone a "redneck" today. At the time, they were opposed to foreign gods and new influences on their traditional and respectable Pantheon.
If anything Rome was a little too open to foreign dieties. Titus performed the right of Evocatio at the siege of Jerusalem, a custom where the god(s) of their foes were enticed to abandon their current patrons in return for a home and worship on Rome.
Eh, even those polytheistic societies had their own inquisitions. Socrates was executed for defying the gods, and lots of Christians and Jews were persecuted because they refused to accept that the emperor was a god.
Socrates was charged with corrupting the youth. That charge is almost never given context when it comes up in modern classrooms, so read this:
Suggested reading: "How the Irish Saved Civilization" [0]
Most cultural phenomena, be is classified as religious, philosophical, political, etc, are double-edged swords. The transition of the Western Roman empire to a succession of leaders from outside that tradition did lead to major losses in living standards of most Europeans. On the whole the root causes are certainly multi-factor such as large epidemics [1] and reflect significant susceptibilities in Roman culture. Many of the seeds for the Renaissance were held safe in the religious monasteries of the Medieval period and Cahill makes the case for the extremely remote Irish redoubts as making a critical contribution. If they made errors in which palimpsests to overwrite, well it is a pity that there wasn't a St. Linus of Torvalds there to save them with git.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...
People are already correcting you, but I find it hard to read this much into the case of this particular text. We'd need to know the full context to what exactly happened, but they might have chosen to sacrifice the catalog for many reasons, not just because of an anti-scientific bend. Maybe it was one of many copies that they held, yet the other ones didn't survive.
We also need to consider that these sorts of texts did survive because of monks. They kept the embers alive. Without them, we would have nothing, not living among the stars.
even stuff like the maya codices, priests just burned up almost every bit of text and historical text that the culture kept so were just missing SO much on them
They were in the process of righteously stamping out one of the most blood thirsty civilizations ever, but yes they got mildly overzealous with the books. I think they nonetheless errored on the side of caution.
Except this wasn't "scraped off to make yet another Bible".
St John Climacus' writings are some of the most interesting in the history of Christianity. Probably the most mystical of all Christian writings and give an amazing insight into the history of Christian monasticism. Also still held in high regard for sure in the Orthodox Churches.
What could the "West" have accomplished? Perhaps in a religious zeal we only would have burned ourselves up long ago. A knowledge of math and science does not innately impart some higher wisdom.
As it is we have cabals of bankers and technocrats applying every mathematical and scientific advancement in attempting to construct their own version of global authoritarian priest classes. For now it stands they are only being held back by the other things learned from other humanist disciplines...
I was thinking exactly this. Having just toured Rome, the Christian history is considerably easier to access than the older Roman history, even for prominent sites like the Forum, Palatine Hill, the Colosseum. The quality of the Christian work was also far inferior to the older layers underneath.
Darkly amusing is the Vatican. Reading about piety, service, generosity and kindness while beggars suffer at the entrance queue. The contrast between words and actions couldn’t be more striking.
The beggars are professionals almost every single time. To the point where they have licenses from the state to beg (my friends were filming an amateur film in Rome and were stopped by the Guardia because they thought my friends were breaking the law by impersonating a Gypsy.)
I don’t believe that for those I saw. Do you have a link to anything explaining begging licences?
Begging barefoot at zero degrees, poor health, dirty and miserable. I don’t see this as anything other than grinding poverty.
If I’m wrong, a sum that doesn’t matter to me was grifted.
Your explanation is convenient for the conscience.
This was in 2006 - digging around, I find things like https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA452289555&sid=googleS...
> Abstract:
> Several Italian judges, including the members of the Supreme Court, have defined begging with children as a "Roma cultural practice". In response, the Italian Parliament enacted law no. 94/2009, which severely represses the practice. The article contests that begging is a Roma cultural practice and claims, instead, that it is an economic practice which may sometimes connect to other elements of Roma culture. The article critiques both the cultural argument put forward by Italian judges, and Italian law no. 94/2009, neither of which serves to defend the rights of Roma children. It concludes by suggesting a different kind of legal approach to child begging, more respectful of the constitutional duty of solidarity and protection of the family, and based on social policies rather then criminal repression.
and references to Article 669-bis C.P. talking about this 2018 law "re-introducing" limits to begging, so I suspect that the "impersonating a gypsy" bit was a mis-understanding and it was really "impersonating a person in need".
> If I’m wrong, a sum that doesn’t matter to me was grifted.
"Give to anyone who asks" is a fine approach, one that I follow too.