Michael Baizerman Author

My new chapter is titled "Four Questions and the World Within". This is a very short and concise conclusion to Unit 1, The Miraculous Revival or the Painful Discovery. After completing the first part, I addressed my publishing house, GenZ TM, with a proposal to find a beta reader for my book. I would like to listen to some advice, while the project is under way. They agreed to look through Unit 1 and sent me the editor's remarks. This is not what I asked but I am very grateful and even more convinced in following my course. I am currently working on additions to a new chapter, The Trefoil of the World, from Unit 2.   I continue taking the FutureLearn course, The European Discovery of China, that will help me  correct my further units. My articles on Scriggler has attracted over 16 K visitors.  I'm going to give them more food for thought. I decided to remove an essential part, devoted to maritime discoveries, from my book. These chapters are more appropriate f...

Phoenician cargo ship  Courtesy: https://wikis.engrade.com/phoenicianships  My fourth chapter deals with the issue of the dimensions of the ocean and the perspectives of navigation in the Atlantic.  I describe the voyages of ancient explorers from Egypt to West Africa (Sataspes, Hanno the Navigator) and from India to East Africa (Scylax). I also recount the views on crossing the Atlantic expressed by philosophers (Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Posidonius, Strabo, Seneca, Pierre d'Ailly), mapmakers (Henricus Martellus, Martin Behaim), and navigators (Christopher Columbus).  The chapter is accompanied by the table, Estimation of the Breadth of the Ocean Sea. This is an extract which refers to the voyage across Africa carried out by Phoenician mariners in the time of Pharaoh Necho: The first expedition, commissioned by Pharaoh Necho, who reigned at the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, set a task of exploring the confines of the Dark Conti...

Chapter 3 of my book focuses on the classical and medieval estimations of the length of the oikoumene. I'd like to share with you an extract where Strabo presents his ideas about the graphic representation of the known world and Eratosthenes offers his description of the "human planet". Another argument that flared up the ancient community of scholars referred to the extent of the oikoumene, i.e.” the world which we inhabit and know.” (2). Strabo imposed upon a geographer the primary task of understanding “our inhabited world-its size, shape, and character, and its relation to earth as a whole”. (3) To achieve this goal, an explorer had to focus on the “human planet”, omitting the fringes and unfamiliar regions: “the geographer undertakes to describe the known parts of the inhabited world, but he leaves out of consideration the unknown parts… as he does what is outside of it”. (4) The "blank spots" on the map, confined within unsettled territories of desert...