Episode 33: January 27th 2010 : Ptolemy’s Almagest

If you had the task of gathering all of humanity’s knowledge of
cosmology in one place, how would you do it? Answers to questions
such as, How big is the Earth? At what date and time will the Moon
be full again? What makes the Sun shine? How old is the Universe?
Today a good place to start the project would be to scour the
sources online. In about 150AD Claudius Ptolemaeus, better known as
Ptolemy, a Greek national with Roman citizenship living in Egypt,
attempted to do just that. He is best known for his encyclopaedic
work written in ancient Greek “Syntaxis Mathematica”, perhaps
better known as the Almagest from the Arabic Al magisti “the
greatest”. He was an industrious author of many scientific and
mathematical treaties but he also collected works going back
hundreds of years. The Almagest was the premier source of knowledge
for describing the cosmos for almost two thousand years. Nothing of
the original survives, only hand written copies of hand written
copies. Today's episode is partially about one such copy, A seven
hundred year old manuscript identified recently in the special
collections of the Brotherton Library in the University of Leeds.
Only parts of it is the Almagest. The manuscript was kept by
Anthony Askew,   Joseph windham and then  lord
Brotherton who donated it to the University of Leeds. This episode
is also about how information is transmitted through history. The
value that successive individuals, societies and civilisations put
on them. The inevitable errors in the mishmash of translations over
hundreds of years from one language (Ancient Greek, Syriac, Arabic,
Latin and English) to another or the periodic attempts by one
scribe to diligently copy the work of another. In early 2009 Dr
Regine May and Professor Malcolm Heath came across a 14th century
manuscript catalogued as a work of Astrology and discovered it
contained elements of Ptolemy's Almagest. The manuscript in three
volumes has yet to receive detailed  scholarly scrutiny. In
today's episode there are 4 contributors.  Dr Regine May
outlines how the almost accidental discovery of this manuscript
came about and Dr Oliver Pickering, the keeper of the special
collections describes how the library acquired the manuscript. A
live recording of Professor Malcolm Heath, Dr Allan Chapman and Dr
Oliver Pickering inspecting the manuscript in the Brotherton
Library. ==================================== Friedrich Nietzsche
was a German philosopher of the late 19th century who read and
wrote about the ancient Greek culture. Perhaps it was the writings
from the ancient Greek civilisation which lead him to conclude The
future influences the present just as much as the past.