From ancient times, the rise and fall of the River Nile portended periods of famine or good fortune for the peoples of Egypt. Other than wells, the River Nile is the only source of water in the country. During an idyllic year, the flooding of the Nile would begin in July, and by September its receding waters would deposit a rich, black silt in its wake for farming. Before taming the river, however, the ancient Egyptians had to overcome the river's peculiar problem.
Malaspina Great Books is a biographical database on Great Ideas. These are the living ideas that have shaped, defined and directed world culture for over 2,500 years. By definition the Great Ideas are radical.
The Warburg Institute of the University of London exists principally to further the study of the classical tradition, that is of those elements of European thought, literature, art and institutions which derive from the ancient world. It houses an Archive, a Library and a Photographic Collection.
THE VATICAN SECRET ARCHIVES
(opened to the public by Pope Leo XIII)
RULES FOR SCHOLARS
1. The Archives are open to qualified scholars from institutions of Higher Education pursuing academic research.
2. Applications requesting access to the Archives should be submitted, accompanied by a letter of introduction from either a recognized institution of Higher Education or from a suitably qualified person in the field of historical research, to the Prefect.
Until one of the most important libraries in the world shifts its collections to a digital format, researchers will find themselves traveling to Rome and seeking permission to read documents in the Vatican Library and 'Secret Archives' collections. These pages, though mostly in Italian, include information in English about procedures for gaining access to the collections. This information may prove most useful to scholars of Early Modern European Science, Technology and Medicine.
The following pages contain a bibliography of secondary literature concerning the fortuna of classical authors to the year 1650.
The National Atomic Museum is the nation's only congressionally chartered museum of nuclear science and history. The museum was established in 1969 as an intriguing place to learn the story of the Atomic Age, from early research of nuclear development through today's peaceful uses of nuclear technology.
It is fairly obvious that Roman numerals are more difficult to use than our Hindu-Arabic numerals. They are fine for recording a date or indicating a chapter number. But, they make arithmetic somewhat difficult.
Formal studies in the history of mathematics developed much more slowly than studies in mathematics itself. There is a particular difficulty in that those who are well trained in historical analysis are typically insufficiently versed in mathematics to be able to appreciate the subject at hand. This has left mathematicians to write their history, by and large, although they are usually untrained for that task.
Archimedes was born in the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily in 287 BC. He was the son of an astronomer and mathematician named Phidias. Aside from that, very little is known about the early life of Archimedes or his family. Some maintain that he belonged to the nobility of Syracuse, and that his family was in some way related to that of Hiero II, King of Syracuse.
This site is a companion piece to an Archimedes exhibit at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. The Gallery exhibit is centered around The Archimedes Palimpsest, a rare and ancient document that contains a compendium of the Greek mathematicians's work, the only copy of his essay, Method of Mechanical Theorems, and the only source for the treatise, On Floating Bodies, in the original Greek. The site contains a nice timeline and biography of Archimedes' life, an explanation of the historical significance of the Palimpsest, and a history of the discovery and conservation of the piece. The site is professionally designed, informative, and easy to navigate. The site may serve as a resource for historians interested in rare manuscripts and their preservation.
Unfortunately none of the people to inhabit the land of present-day Latvia in the ninth millennium B.C. left their memoirs. New Indo-European tribes, living by stock raising and farming, appeared here in the second millennium B.C. They were the ancestors of the Baltic tribes - the Letts (the Kursi, Zemgali, Latgali) and the Lithuanians. The Latvian nationality subsequently came into being, as a result of the convergence of these tribes, sharing similar languages, cultures and economic ties. Historians have found the Balts first were mentioned in the book of the ancient historian Herodotus - in his Book IV of Historiae he described the nation Neuru which was later identified with ancient Balts. The peoples of the Mediterranean were interested in the Baltics mostly because of the amber found there. We can find the Baltic peoples mentioned also in works of Claudius Ptolemaeus (around 150 A.D.). In one of the IX century chronicles there was the first mention of a Latvian tribe - the Chori, but still in Western Europe there was not much known about the nations living on the coast of the Baltic Sea. One of the significant sources about the ancient Balts is the Icelandic historical Sagas (Islendingasògur and Konungasògur). [Radins, 1996]
