Ancient (BCE-40 CE)

The desire to explore the unknown has been a driving force in human history since the dawn of time. From the earliestdocumented accounts, ancient civilizations have explored the earth by sea. Early adventurers were motivated by religious beliefs, the desire forconquest, the need to establish trade routes, and hunger for gold. Modern history books begin the age of exploration with the fourteenth century, but there is evidence that exploration between Europe and Asia began much earlier. Travel between Greece and India, for instance, was common in Alexander the Great's time because his vast empire included territories of both countries. The Han Dynasty of China and the Roman Empire, likewise, had regular trade relations and even exchanged a few diplomats.

The Sumerians and ancient greeks were expert astronomers. I have not got much data on Sumerian astronomers, but suffice to say that they gave us the degree as a unit of angular measurement as they liked a sexagesimal system and 360 was almost the same as the number of days in a year. The Greeks came later but on quite a few of them I can find enough data to help me fill this page. Among them we find the following people:

This huge database provides access to every page of each of the 125,000 books published in the British Isles and abroad for the British market from 1475-1700. In all it covers more than 2.5 million pages and represents a complete corpus of published material in every subject and in every early modern language. Searching is highly sophisticated and retrived items can be dowloaded and/or printed. Access at present is via servers in Ann Arbor Michigan, but access will be from the UK some tine in 2003

Eclipses of the Sun and Moon have always left a deep impression on their viewers. The loss of the Sun, the bringer of life for ancient people, was considered a bad omen. Many ancient people—including those in the Caribbean and the islands of the Pacific— believed that during an eclipse a monster or dragon was eating the Sun. The time of an eclipse was one of prayers, sacrifices, and noise as they attempted to make the dragon drop its prey—and the dragon always did!
 

German LIbrary of the Year 2002

The ancient Roman religion known as the Mithraic mysteries has captivated the imaginations of scholars for generations. There are two reasons for this fascination. First, like the other ancient "mystery religions," such as the Eleusinian mysteries and the mysteries of Isis, Mithraism maintained strict secrecy about its teachings and practices, revealing them only to initiates.

We are on the verge today of a much greater appreciation for the scientific achievements of the world's most ancient civilizations and an understanding of the workings of the ancient mind. At a time when it is still fashionable for scientists to dismiss the possibility that the learned men of remote antiquity, long before the classical-period Greeks or the later Romans, could have known about phenomena like precession (the extremely slow wobble of the Earth's axis of rotation) without modern instruments, or about the spherical shape and dimensions of our planetary spacecraft or its orbit about the Sun as the center of a solar system, a few lone investigators have recently found traces of a very high degree of scientific sophistication and knowledge of the natural world preserved in a metaphorical code which we call myth.

A Scandalously Short Introduction to the History of Pharmacy

This is an encyclopedia on mythology, folklore, legends, and more. It contains over 6100 definitions of gods and goddesses, supernatural beings and legendary creatures and monsters from all over the world.

This page fills a gap that I noticed, in the lack of online science textbooks and historical works: the viewer is directed to the different sites using the approximate date that the book was written. The page consists of all the books, that I could find, using a fairly broad definition of science and technology.