by Richard Farr
285 BCE: Eratosthenes is born at Kyrene, on the coast of modern Libya.
260 BCE: Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes is living at Syracuse, in Sicily.
240 BCE: While serving as the librarian of the great library at Alexandria, the Greek polymath Eratosthenes is visited by his friend Archimedes; the Antikythera Mechanism is created at about this date.
230 BCE: Eratosthenes writes the Geographika; only a few copies are ever made.
79 BCE: The great Roman lawyer, orator, and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero visits the island of Rhodes and meets the Greek philosopher, educator, and collector Posidonius, who owns probably the last surviving copy of Eratosthenes’s Geographika.
78 BCE: On their way from Rhodes to Rome, two little elm-planked merchant ships sink in a storm, just a stone’s throw from Point Glyphadia, off the island of Antikythera; two thousand years later, in 1900, one of them will become the first shipwreck from the ancient world ever found.
250–300 CE: Neoplatonism puts an explicitly religious spin on Plato’s idea that the soul, spirit, or mind has to be released from the corrupt prison of the body in order to find its way to the truth/the realm of Forms/enlightenment/heaven.
900–1000 CE: Collapse of the Maya Empire in Central America and the Aksumite Empire in northeast Africa; building of Monk’s Mound, Cahokia, Illinois.
1200–1400 CE: Collapse of Khmer and Angkor Empires; collapse or disappearance of the Sinagua, Anasazi, and Fremont cultures in North America; end of the Mound Builder cultures in the American Midwest.
1400–1800 CE: The cultures of the central Amazon Basin build sophisticated urban civilizations and are able to sustain a population of over ten million people; by the mid-nineteenth century, nearly all of them have vanished, and Europeans will discover what they believe to be virgin jungle.
1500 CE: Extinction of the Greenland Vikings.
1872 CE (December 3): George Smith presents his translation of the “Deluge Tablets”—part of the Epic of Gilgamesh—to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London.
1874 CE: Heinrich Schliemann publishes his claim to have rediscovered Homer’s “mythical” Troy at Hisarlik in Turkey.
1900 CE: Sir Arthur Evans begins to uncover a great building at Knossos on Crete, identifies it as the palace of King Minos, and names as Minoan the previously unknown civilization that built it.
1908 CE: Luigi Pernier discovers the original Phaistos Disk at a Minoan palace in southern Crete.
1952 CE: After decades of work by Michael Ventris, Alice Kober, and others, the riddle of the Minoan Linear B script is solved. Despite the strange script, it is not an unknown language, but a very early form of Greek. The other famous Minoan script, Linear A, remains a mystery—along with Rongorongo, Proto-Elamite, the Indus Valley script, and several other scripts known only from fragments.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © David Hiller
Richard Farr is a recovering philosopher.
His first book, Emperors of the Ice: A True Story of Disaster and Survival in the Antarctic, 1910–13, describes the legendary 1911 Winter Journey on Ross Island. It won both a Washington State Book Award and a starred Outstanding Book listing from the National Science Teachers Association. Reviewers have described it as “spellbinding,” “enthralling,” and “so gripping you will not want to put it down.”
Richard has also published a short introduction to science, You Are Here: A User’s Guide to the Universe, and a novel about obsession, art forgery, murder, and madness, The Truth about Constance Weaver. He is currently working on three new projects: Book Two of the Babel Trilogy; a middle-grade novel set in the thirteenth-most-boring place in the world (A Plague of Frogs); and a memoir (What I Expected: A Love Letter Written During a Panic Attack).
Like some of the characters in this book, he lives in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, enjoys the coffee at Espresso Vivace and Victrola, and gets his hair cut at Scream. More at www.richardfarr.net.