scholarly journals The true date of Meton’s observation of the summer solstice

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 978-1010
Author(s):  
Dmitri Panchenko
Keyword(s):  
Summer Solstice ◽  
Initial Part ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Greek Astronomy

The date assigned to Meton’s highly reputed observation of the summer solstice in the Almagest implies June 27, 432 BC. Since the solstice took actually place a day later, such an inaccuracy presents a puzzle. It can be demonstrated, however, that Meton’s observation was in fact accurate, for he made it on June 28, 433 BC. This follows from adequate interpretation of chronological indications in Thucydides and finds support in various data of the ancient sources. The mistaken date arose, and was maintained, because of the misleading assumption according to which the Athenian archon year invariably began after the summer solstice. It was wrongly decided that Meton had observed the summer solstice at the end of the year of the archon Apseudes and not at its initial part. The true date of Meton’s solstice presents in new light the observation of the summer solstice by Aristarchus of Samos, Eudoxus’ preoccupation with the octaeteris and early Greek astronomy in general. The beginning of the Peloponnesian War is now firmly established at early April (almost certainly, April 6), 431 BC.

Sufi Springs: Air on an Oud String

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Rooney
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Initial Part ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
The Will ◽  
Arts Activism

The initial part of Caroline Rooney's essay offers an incisive account of the author's experience of Cairo in the years leading up to the 2011 uprisings that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak's rule. Rooney's narrative evinces an active Downtown cosmopolitan spirit characterised by a burgeoning sense of ‘audacity’ in forms of arts activism, and its attendant collective spirit of perseverance that increasingly rendered ineffective the repressive manoeuvres of Egypt's disciplinary State. Criticising the impulse to construe the Egyptian revolution in terms of a mimetic desire for a secular democracy on Western lines, Rooney insists that the Arab uprisings consisted, in many respects, of a revolution against Western-style free market neoliberalism. Countering the perpetual cynicism attendant to the latter, Rooney argues, requires a form of politicisation that maintains ‘the ongoing presence of the real as a matter of collective spirit’ – one that can outlast the colonial interlude by resisting the absolutist self-assertion of market fundamentalism and its collusions with ‘diplo-economic cosmopolitanism’ as a mode of class-discriminatory privilege, as well as the compromising nature of right-wing Islam. Rooney moves on to locate a counter-movement based on an alternative form of consciousness that manifests itself ‘as solidarity, as resoluteness, as genuine comradeship, as collective consciousness, as revolutionary faith and [as] festiveness.’ In the last part of her essay, Rooney raises the intriguing case of Sufism, and specifically its mulid rituals and its important role in the Egyptian revolutionary effort, as a relational cultural mode that can survive the will-to-dominance as a persistent and liberatory collective gesture.

Birds of Summer Solstice: World-Renewal Rituality on the Northern Gulf Coast of Florida

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua M. Goodwin ◽  
Kenneth E. Sassaman ◽  
Meggan E. Blessing ◽  
David W. Steadman
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Gulf Coast ◽  
Fish Bone ◽  
Eastern North America ◽  
Summer Solstice ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Northern Gulf Coast

Prevalent as bird imagery is in the ritual traditions of eastern North America, the bony remains of birds are relatively sparse in archaeological deposits and when present are typically viewed as subsistence remains. A first-millennium ad civic-ceremonial centre on the northern Gulf Coast of Florida contains large pits with bird bones amid abundant fish bone and other taxa. The avian remains are dominated by elements of juvenile white ibises, birds that were taken from offshore rookeries at the time of summer solstices. The pits into which they were deposited were emplaced on a relict dune with solstice orientations. The timing and siting of solstice feasts at this particular centre invites discussion of world-renewal rituality and the significance of birds in not only the timing of these events but also possibly as agents of balance and rejuvenation.

scholarly journals Impact of solar radiation and environmental temperature on Art Nouveau glass windows

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Palomar ◽  
Miguel Silva ◽  
Marcia Vilarigues ◽  
Isabel Pombo Cardoso ◽  
David Giovannacci
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Composition ◽  
Solar Radiation ◽  
Surface Temperature ◽  
Environmental Temperature ◽  
Summer Solstice ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
Ir Thermography ◽  
Hot Air ◽  
Near Ir ◽  
Air Pocket

Abstract This work presents the results of the evaluation of two Art Nouveau glass windows from the Casa-Museu Dr. Anastácio Gonçalves (Lisbon, Portugal) with IR-thermography during the summer solstice. According to the measurements, the surface temperature of glass depended on the outdoor environmental temperature and, mainly, on the direct solar radiation. Colored glasses presented a higher surface temperature due to the absorption of their chromophores at near-IR wavelengths. Enamels and grisailles showed higher surface temperatures than their support glasses due to both their chemical composition and color. The protective glazing, with small slits in one of the window panels, induced a hot-air pocket in its upper part due to the insufficient ventilation.

scholarly journals Old Persian in Athens Revisited (Ar. Ach. 100)

Mnemosyne ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 657-681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Willi
Keyword(s):  
Central Element ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Old Persian

AbstractThe Old Persian line in Aristophanes' Acharnians (100) is commonly believed to contain nothing but comic gibberish. Against this view, it is argued here that a responsible reconstruction of an Old Persian original is possible if one takes into account what we nowadays know about late fifth-century Old Persian. Moreover, the result, whose central element is the Persian verb for 'writing',fits in with both general considerations on linguistic realism in drama and the historical reality of diplomatic interaction between Greece and Persia during the Peloponnesian War.

Greek Astronomy

1949 ◽  
Vol 180 (4) ◽  
pp. 44-47
Author(s):  
George de Santillana
Keyword(s):  
Greek Astronomy

The Peloponnesian War

2003 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Lawrence D. Freedman ◽  
Donald Kagan
Keyword(s):  
Peloponnesian War

Hegemony and strategic culture: American power projection and alliance defence politics

1988 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley S. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
State System ◽  
Strategic Analysis ◽  
Strategic Culture ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
American Power ◽  
Power Projection ◽  
Strategic Studies

The whole field of Strategic Studies bears the crippling legacy of having abstracted question of war and peace from their embeddedness in historically produced relations of social movements, political economy and culture. The very objects of strategic analysis—states and their mutual security alliances—are presumed to have been there from the start. And the principles underpinning their interactions are likewise construed as consistent with the rules governing a state system first made evident in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War.

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