5 ms·

Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original

70 points by bookofjoe 9mo ago

unit149 9mo ago
[dead]
gxonatano 9mo ago
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.
- adolph 9mo ago
  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_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Plague
  - wqaatwt 9mo ago
    > living standards of most Europeans That’s not that clear, at least when it came to the median European. Amongst other things demographic collapse usually results in higher living standards in agricultural societies due to there being more land per capita.
    - adolph 9mo ago
      Very true in that "living standards" is very subjective. When I wrote that I was thinking of London's population loss, not achieving a similar population until the 1300s. And I was thinking of claims that European literacy rates likewise took a long time to recover. I don't think it is right to say that population loss usually results in higher living standards due to more land per capita. For one, in a pre-industrial society agriculture is labor intensive and the amount of land that can be worked by a person does not scale with land availability. The Black Death [1] economic section works out some of the less than positive impacts. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
      - wqaatwt 9mo ago
        > not achieving a similar population until the 1300s That’s not the necessarily best metric either, though. Roman city sizes (especially Rome itself) very inflated due to centralized state redirecting a lot of tax revenue there. However in premodern times pretty much all cities universally had negative population growth which would imply they weren’t particularly nice places to live if you had better options.
        adolph 9mo ago
        > However in premodern times pretty much all cities universally had negative population growth which would imply they weren’t particularly nice places to live if you had better options. Your point is well taken although I must point out that for the above to be true the cities could never exist in the first place. Depending on where you put the cut-off point of "premodern" the contact between precolumbian and European cultures in North America had some notion that people on the European side would sometimes immigrate to Indian culture but not vice versa. "The Down of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow [0] goes into transcultural impacts at length. A more original source can be found in a letter by Ben Franklin in 1753 [1]: When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything 1. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter-collinson/ https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter...
- garciansmith 9mo ago
  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.
  - cyberax 9mo ago
    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.
    - stryan 9mo ago
      >> 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.
- pegasus 9mo ago
  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 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".
  - mdurana 9mo ago
    For anybody interested in the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52259619-dominion 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.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- jact 9mo ago
  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.
  - DarknessFalls 9mo ago
    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.
    - jact 9mo 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.
    - riazrizvi 9mo ago
      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.
      - throwpoaster 9mo ago
- wsowens 9mo ago
  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.
  - lukan 9mo ago
    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.
    - something765478 9mo ago
      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.
      - mikkupikku 9mo ago
        Socrates was charged with corrupting the youth. That charge is almost never given context when it comes up in modern classrooms, so read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Tyrants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Tyrants
- nsavage 9mo ago
  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.
- exhumet 9mo ago
  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
  - mikkupikku 9mo ago
    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.
- dismalaf 9mo ago
  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.
- lostlogin 9mo ago
  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.
  - svieira 9mo ago
    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.)
    - lostlogin 9mo ago
      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.
      - svieira 9mo ago
        This was in 2006 - digging around, I find things like https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA452289555&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=15280748&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Ed1b254cc&aty=open-web-entry 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.
- 52-6F-62 9mo ago
  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...
- throwpoaster 9mo ago
  Flagged for hate speech.
- PepperdineG 9mo ago
  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.
- zozbot234 9mo ago
  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.
  - wqaatwt 9mo ago
    The Roman state was arguably much more modern than the medieval kingdom. It was highly centralized and funded through taxation (most of the plundering was already done by the early imperial period). Not sure the Huns were the biggest direct threat either (unless we think that they are directly responsible for the Gothic migrations/invasions who were the ones who took over significant parts of the empire).
    - zozbot234 9mo ago
      The "taxation" point is arguable since so much of it occurred in the provinces and basically amounted to plunder. Also, centralization is not much of a marker of modernity: the Ancient Near East had large centralized empires, but they were also similarly vulnerable to collapse for practically the same structural reasons; we just know a lot less about those times and places because the sources are so much more sparse and understudied.
      - wqaatwt 9mo ago
        Paradoxically we do know a lot more about some of the ancient Near Eastern societies than most states that preceded or succeeded them. There are still thousands of clay tablets which nobody really had time to read, while pretty much all Roman and Greek texts (and effectively all administrative documents) that weren’t copied during the middle ages are lost. > provinces and basically amounted to plunder. Also redistribution. The mid/late Roman state spent had huge taxes and spent almost all of it paying for its professional army almost all of which was stationed in the provinces. As a consequence the Roman economy was highly monetized, long distance trade was widespread and different regions economically interdependent which again seems rather modern. Also when talking about “plunder” in the ancient world it's almost entirely slaves not gold/silver or moveable goods. That had mostly dried up during the imperial period.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- wqaatwt 9mo ago
  Yet somehow the scientific method as we know it evolved in (and only in) Christian universities. Of course there were significant regressions but the Roman world wasn’t exactly some pro-science utopia. Where do you think Christians got the idea of burning witches? Climate change, the plague and extreme political instability (that already was ripping the Roman world apart for centuries) and the resulting societal, economic and demographic collapse pretty much made the dark ages inevitable (and the church was the only thing keeping the lights on however dim they were).
  - RupertSalt 9mo ago
    Honestly, we could make a case that witch-hunting and persecutions were pro-science. Witches and "cunning folk" are people who use metaphysical, occult means of spirituality to influence people and the environment. Witchcraft does not appear, to the dispassionate observer, to be scientific, evidence-based, or empirical at all. Christendom was in the business of supporting many liberal arts and sciences, in terms of architecture, literacy, mathematics, chemistry/alchemy, exploration, R&D and building of war materiels and sea vessels. It was the witches who were meddling and using occult means, such as divination, augury, psychological manipulation, and treachery to achieve their ends. It was witchcraft that was chaotic and working against orderly scientific inquiries about the natural world. The witches were typically working clandestinely, stereotypically in a little hut in the woods, in the shadows. The scientists of Christendom were founding and running universities, seminaries, hospitals, and other institutional centers of learning. They were highly organized and orderly endeavors, and witchcraft threatened the natural and political order of things, which seems to be what science represents, even to the present day.
    - wqaatwt 9mo ago
      According to Christian science/theology and worldview witchcraft simple was impossible and belief in it was heretical for most of the middle ages. Witch burnings didn’t become widespread until the early modern period
      - RupertSalt 9mo ago
optimalsolver 9mo ago
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 [0] https://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qsunasstar.html https://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qsunasstar.html
- RupertSalt 9mo ago
  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.
jacobolus 9mo 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.
jschveibinz 9mo ago
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.
kristopolous 9mo ago
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

70 points by bookofjoe 9mo ago

[dead]

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.

adolph 9mo ago
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_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Plague
- wqaatwt 9mo ago
  > living standards of most Europeans That’s not that clear, at least when it came to the median European. Amongst other things demographic collapse usually results in higher living standards in agricultural societies due to there being more land per capita.
  - adolph 9mo ago
    Very true in that "living standards" is very subjective. When I wrote that I was thinking of London's population loss, not achieving a similar population until the 1300s. And I was thinking of claims that European literacy rates likewise took a long time to recover. I don't think it is right to say that population loss usually results in higher living standards due to more land per capita. For one, in a pre-industrial society agriculture is labor intensive and the amount of land that can be worked by a person does not scale with land availability. The Black Death [1] economic section works out some of the less than positive impacts. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
    - wqaatwt 9mo ago
      > not achieving a similar population until the 1300s That’s not the necessarily best metric either, though. Roman city sizes (especially Rome itself) very inflated due to centralized state redirecting a lot of tax revenue there. However in premodern times pretty much all cities universally had negative population growth which would imply they weren’t particularly nice places to live if you had better options.
      - adolph 9mo ago
        > However in premodern times pretty much all cities universally had negative population growth which would imply they weren’t particularly nice places to live if you had better options. Your point is well taken although I must point out that for the above to be true the cities could never exist in the first place. Depending on where you put the cut-off point of "premodern" the contact between precolumbian and European cultures in North America had some notion that people on the European side would sometimes immigrate to Indian culture but not vice versa. "The Down of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow [0] goes into transcultural impacts at length. A more original source can be found in a letter by Ben Franklin in 1753 [1]: When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything 1. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter-collinson/ https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter...
garciansmith 9mo ago
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.
- cyberax 9mo ago
  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.
  - stryan 9mo ago
    >> 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.
pegasus 9mo ago
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 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".
- mdurana 9mo ago
  For anybody interested in the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52259619-dominion 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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
jact 9mo ago
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.
- DarknessFalls 9mo ago
  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.
  - jact 9mo 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.
  - riazrizvi 9mo ago
    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.
    - throwpoaster 9mo ago
wsowens 9mo ago
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.
- lukan 9mo ago
  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.
  - something765478 9mo ago
    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.
    - mikkupikku 9mo ago
      Socrates was charged with corrupting the youth. That charge is almost never given context when it comes up in modern classrooms, so read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Tyrants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Tyrants
nsavage 9mo ago
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.
exhumet 9mo ago
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
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
  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.
dismalaf 9mo ago
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.
lostlogin 9mo ago
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.
- svieira 9mo ago
  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.)
  - lostlogin 9mo ago
    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.
    - svieira 9mo ago
      This was in 2006 - digging around, I find things like https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA452289555&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=15280748&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Ed1b254cc&aty=open-web-entry 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.
52-6F-62 9mo ago
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...
throwpoaster 9mo ago
Flagged for hate speech.
PepperdineG 9mo ago
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.
zozbot234 9mo ago
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.
- wqaatwt 9mo ago
  The Roman state was arguably much more modern than the medieval kingdom. It was highly centralized and funded through taxation (most of the plundering was already done by the early imperial period). Not sure the Huns were the biggest direct threat either (unless we think that they are directly responsible for the Gothic migrations/invasions who were the ones who took over significant parts of the empire).
  - zozbot234 9mo ago
    The "taxation" point is arguable since so much of it occurred in the provinces and basically amounted to plunder. Also, centralization is not much of a marker of modernity: the Ancient Near East had large centralized empires, but they were also similarly vulnerable to collapse for practically the same structural reasons; we just know a lot less about those times and places because the sources are so much more sparse and understudied.
    - wqaatwt 9mo ago
      Paradoxically we do know a lot more about some of the ancient Near Eastern societies than most states that preceded or succeeded them. There are still thousands of clay tablets which nobody really had time to read, while pretty much all Roman and Greek texts (and effectively all administrative documents) that weren’t copied during the middle ages are lost. > provinces and basically amounted to plunder. Also redistribution. The mid/late Roman state spent had huge taxes and spent almost all of it paying for its professional army almost all of which was stationed in the provinces. As a consequence the Roman economy was highly monetized, long distance trade was widespread and different regions economically interdependent which again seems rather modern. Also when talking about “plunder” in the ancient world it's almost entirely slaves not gold/silver or moveable goods. That had mostly dried up during the imperial period.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
wqaatwt 9mo ago
Yet somehow the scientific method as we know it evolved in (and only in) Christian universities. Of course there were significant regressions but the Roman world wasn’t exactly some pro-science utopia. Where do you think Christians got the idea of burning witches? Climate change, the plague and extreme political instability (that already was ripping the Roman world apart for centuries) and the resulting societal, economic and demographic collapse pretty much made the dark ages inevitable (and the church was the only thing keeping the lights on however dim they were).
- RupertSalt 9mo ago
  Honestly, we could make a case that witch-hunting and persecutions were pro-science. Witches and "cunning folk" are people who use metaphysical, occult means of spirituality to influence people and the environment. Witchcraft does not appear, to the dispassionate observer, to be scientific, evidence-based, or empirical at all. Christendom was in the business of supporting many liberal arts and sciences, in terms of architecture, literacy, mathematics, chemistry/alchemy, exploration, R&D and building of war materiels and sea vessels. It was the witches who were meddling and using occult means, such as divination, augury, psychological manipulation, and treachery to achieve their ends. It was witchcraft that was chaotic and working against orderly scientific inquiries about the natural world. The witches were typically working clandestinely, stereotypically in a little hut in the woods, in the shadows. The scientists of Christendom were founding and running universities, seminaries, hospitals, and other institutional centers of learning. They were highly organized and orderly endeavors, and witchcraft threatened the natural and political order of things, which seems to be what science represents, even to the present day.
  - wqaatwt 9mo ago
    According to Christian science/theology and worldview witchcraft simple was impossible and belief in it was heretical for most of the middle ages. Witch burnings didn’t become widespread until the early modern period
    - RupertSalt 9mo ago

optimalsolver 9mo ago

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 [0] https://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qsunasstar.html https://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qsunasstar.html

RupertSalt 9mo ago
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.

jacobolus 9mo 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.

jschveibinz 9mo ago

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.

kristopolous 9mo ago

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