Isaac Newton and the Study of Chronology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelis J. Schilt
Keyword(s):  
Careful Study ◽  
Note Taking ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Full Analysis ◽  
Major Project ◽  
Of Greece

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) devoted ample time to the study of ancient chronology, resulting in the posthumously published <i>The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended</i> (1728). Here, Newton attempted to show how the antiquity of Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and other Mediterranean nations could be reinterpreted to fit the timespan allowed for by Scripture. Yet, as the hundreds of books from his library and the thousands of manuscript pages devoted to the topic show, the <i>Chronology</i> was long in the making. This volume provides the first full analysis of the genesis and evolution of Newton's studies of ancient history and demonstrates how these emerged from that other major project of his, the interpretation of the apocalyptic prophecies in Scripture. A careful study of Newton's reading, note-taking, writing, and ordering practices provides the key to unravelling and reconstructing the chronology of Newton's chronological studies, bringing to light writings hitherto hidden in the archives.

Isaac Newton and the Study of Chronology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelis Schilt
Keyword(s):  
Careful Study ◽  
Note Taking ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Full Analysis ◽  
Major Project ◽  
Of Greece

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) devoted ample time to the study of ancient chronology, resulting in the posthumously published The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728). Here, Newton attempted to show how the antiquity of Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and other Mediterranean nations could be reinterpreted to fit the timespan allowed for by Scripture. Yet as the hundreds of books from his library and the thousands of manuscript pages devoted to the topic show, the Chronology was long in the making. This volume provides the first full analysis of the genesis and evolution of Newton’s studies of ancient history and demonstrates how these emerged from that other major project of his, the interpretation of the apocalyptic prophecies in Scripture. A careful study of Newton’s reading, note-taking, writing, and -ordering practices provides the key to unravelling and reconstructing the chronology of Newton’s chronological studies, bringing to light writings hitherto hidden in the archives.

Newton and the Origin of Civilization

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jed Z. Buchwald ◽  
Mordechai Feingold
Keyword(s):  
Good Reason ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Civilizations ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
One Year ◽  
Radical Ideas

Isaac Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, published in 1728, one year after the great man’s death, unleashed a storm of controversy. And for good reason. The book presents a drastically revised timeline for ancient civilizations, contracting Greek history by five hundred years and Egypt’s by a millennium. This book tells the story of how one of the most celebrated figures in the history of mathematics, optics, and mechanics came to apply his unique ways of thinking to problems of history, theology, and mythology, and of how his radical ideas produced an uproar that reverberated in Europe’s learned circles throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. The book reveals the manner in which Newton strove for nearly half a century to rectify universal history by reading ancient texts through the lens of astronomy, and to create a tight theoretical system for interpreting the evolution of civilization on the basis of population dynamics. It was during Newton’s earliest years at Cambridge that he developed the core of his singular method for generating and working with trustworthy knowledge, which he applied to his study of the past with the same rigor he brought to his work in physics and mathematics. Drawing extensively on Newton’s unpublished papers and a host of other primary sources, the book reconciles Isaac Newton the rational scientist with Newton the natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian, and chronologist of ancient history.

The Causes of Greek Decline

1944 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 10-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. W. Walbank
Keyword(s):  
Economic Life ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Of Greece

In one of the most popular anthology passages in Latin, Servius Sulpicius, writing to console Cicero for his daughter's death, describes how, as he reached Greek waters, sailing from Asia, he began to look about him at the ruins of Greece. ‘Behind me was Aegina, in front of me Megara, on the right the Piraeus, on the left Corinth, cities which had once been prosperous, but now lay shattered ruins before my sight.’ Oppidum cadavera he goes on to call them—corpses of cities! The picture, it will probably be objected, is overdrawn; certainly the ruin of Greece was, by Cicero's time, already a rhetorical commonplace, to be echoed by Horace, Ovid and Seneca in turn. But it was based upon an essential truth. The Saronic Gulf, once the centre of the world, was now, for all that Greece meant, a dead lake lapping about the foundations of dead cities. In that tragic decay—which was not confined to mainland Greece—we are confronted with one of the most urgent problems of ancient history, and one with a special significance for our generation, who were already living in an age of economic, political and spiritual upheaval, even before the bombs began to turn our own cities into shattered ruins.This, then, is my reason for reopening a subject on which there is scope for such diverse opinion: adeo maxima quaeque ambigua sunt. If any further justification is required, then I will only add that the recent publication of Professor Michael Rostovtzeff's classic study of the social and economic life of the Hellenistic Age is at once an invitation and a challenge.

scholarly journals THE EMERGENCE AND IMPACT OF MONEY IN GREECE AND LIFE BACK THEN

2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (07) ◽  
pp. 187-192
Author(s):  
Haifa Abdul Rahman AL SHAAFI
Keyword(s):  
Historical Review ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The City ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
Greek Civilization

The Greek civilization is one of the basic elements of the so-called civilization conflict in ancient times, and history has preserved the echo of that conflict, but historians have been limited to describing and evaluating the conflict without focusing on the role of money in managing the movement of the conflict, which had an influential nature in the politics of Greece in general , especially after Macedonia entered the line of conflict and took control of the city of Krindes at the foot of Mount Pangios, which is distinguished by its richness of gold, as it made it richer than the rest of the Greek states,Philip took out from it thousands of gold every year, which enabled him to bribe the opposition politicians, and this is where the researchs' importance is marked with the emergence of money in the Greek countries and its impact on life back then. Based on this importance, the reason for choosing this particular topic is of the axes of the historical review conference - Ancient history- as the study aims to find similarities and differences between the money spread in that period since this topic was studied according to the historical method.

Troubled Senses

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jed Z. Buchwald ◽  
Mordechai Feingold
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human History ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Argumentative Structure

This chapter considers the roots of Isaac Newton’s interest in natural and historical knowledge. In the late seventeenth century, experiment-based knowledge remained suspect. Technical chronologers developed systems of concordances and sequences that located events of human history in time by means of their simultaneous occurrences with particular astronomical events, usually eclipses. It is precisely here that Isaac Newton, as a chronologer, differed programatically from his predecessors: he sought to use astronomical tools to mold singular events into a system for understanding ancient history, indeed for grasping the entire development of civilization—what’s more, a system that shared and exemplified the same evidentiary and argumentative structure deployed in his science.

The Most Silent Women of Greece and Rome: Rural Labour and Women's Life in the Ancient World (I)

1995 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Schidel
Keyword(s):  
Minority Group ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Ancient Agriculture ◽  
Roman Literature ◽  
Ancient Society ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Of Greece

Over the last twenty years, the study of the women of the Greek and Roman world has experienced a boom that, if it is judged by the sheer output of relevant publications, dwarfs any other recent innovations and redirections in the field of ancient history. In view of the ongoing proliferation of studies on this topic, I can only hope that my present paper not only adds to the bulk but also a little to the stock (to heed Laurence Sterne's lament over the historian's business) in that it seeks to redress an imbalance that informs most previous research on women's life in classical antiquity. In short, the large majority of studies in this particular field concentrate on urban environments and, as a consequence, give undue prominence to a certain segment, actually a minority group in terms of quantity, of ancient society. Needless to say, however, that, given the nature of our sources, anything else than this biased focus would have been a big surprise and probably impossible to achieve. Even so, the busy study of those layers of ancient society that produced, or caught the eye of, the authors of Greek and Roman literature, inscriptions, papyri, and coinlegends, can be fully vindicated only when the more shadowy and obscure regions of ancient history are not allowed to be passed over in complete silence. The contribution of women to ancient agriculture is an issue that falls squarely within that latter, underprivileged category of subjects. In her introduction to a collection of essays on new methodological approaches to the study of women in antiquity, Marilyn Skinner pointed out that ‘Real women, like other muted groups, are not to be found so much in the explicit text of the historical record as in its gaps and silences – a circumstance that requires the application of research methods based largely upon controlled inference’

Ancient History and the Modern Citizen

1962 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-66
Author(s):  
R. G. Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Modern History ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Of Greece

In the preface to his third volume of Thucydides, dated January 1835, Thomas Arnold referred to ‘what is miscalled ancient history, the really modern history of Greece and Rome’. The great headmaster went on to express the hope that ‘these volumes may contribute to the conviction that history is to be studied as a whole and according to philosophical divisions, not such as are merely geographical and chronological; that the history of Greece and Rome is not an idle inquiry about remote ages and forgotten institutions, but a living picture of things present, fitted not so much for the curiosity of the scholar, as for the instruction of the statesman and the citizen’. Today, with education so subject to the demands of utility, it is a vital duty for us to stress these claims. If we are to preserve in our schools the study of antiquity we must show how it can help us to face the problems of modern life.

scholarly journals Zygmunt Mineyko (1840-1925) i poszukiwanie starożytnej Dodony

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Joachim Śliwa
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Civil Engineering ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The North ◽  
North Western ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
Vast Territory

Zygmunt Mineyko (1840 –1925) and the Discovery of Ancient Dodona The text is devoted to Zygmunt Mineyko – a participant of the 1863 January Uprising, who had to look for safety in Western Europe after the collapse of the patriotic insurrection and the resulting repressions. Having acquired relevant professional qualifications in France, Mineyko worked as a specialist in civil engineering in the vast territory of the Ottoman Empire. In the years 1875–1876, working in the north-western part of Greece (Epirus), he managed to identify the location of Dodona – the main ancient sanctuary of Zeus. Due to the shortage of funds, he accepted financial support from a rich Greek Konstantinos Karapanos. In 1878, Karapanos issued a publication in Paris in which he attributed the discovery of the sanctuary and the results of work entirely to himself, mentioning only briefly Mineyko as his assistant engineer. From that moment on, Mineyko started to strive for the acknowledgement of his rights as a discoverer. His actions were not always effective, but the essential argument still laid in his hands. The most important historic items still belonged to him, as they had been discovered already at the time when he carried on the search by himself. A particularly valuable group of these objects (the famous group of the “Dodona bronzes”) was sold to the Museum in Berlin via his eldest daughter and sonin-law Ludwik Karol Potocki only in 1904. The text quotes also archive materials from the collection of the Academy of Arts and Sciences that were drawn up in 1877; Mineyko tried to arouse interest in his discovery also by presenting it directly to Polish experts in ancient history. Within the scope of the activity of the Archaeological Commission, on the basis of materials submitted by Mineyko, Professor Marian Sokołowski prepared a long report, defending Mineyko’s rights to the discovery (the text was published in the subsequent year).

States of Memory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Yates
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Persian War ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
Over Time

The Persian War was one of the most significant events in ancient history. It halted Persia’s westward expansion, inspired the Golden Age of Greece, and propelled Athens to the heights of power. From the end of the war almost to the end of antiquity, the Greeks and later the Romans recalled the battles and heroes of this war with unabated zeal. The resulting monuments and narratives have long been used to elucidate the history of the war itself, but they have only recently begun to be used to explore how the conflict was remembered over time. In the present study, Yates demonstrates (1) that the Greeks recalled the Persian War as members of their respective poleis, not collectively as Greeks, (2) that the resulting differences were extensive and fiercely contested, and (3) that a mutually accepted recollection of the war did not emerge until Philip of Macedonia and Alexander the Great shattered the conceptual domination of the polis at the battle of Chaeronea. These conclusions suggest that any cohesion in the classical tradition of the Persian War implied by the surviving historical accounts (most notably Herodotus) or postulated by moderns is illusory. The focus of the book falls on the classical period, but it also includes a brief discussion of the hellenistic commemoration of the war that follows those trends set in motion by Philip and Alexander.

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