On the Road (1)

My Scriggler audience is growing; it will hopefully hit the 20 K mark within two weeks. My readers mostly come from the USA, India, the UK, and Hungary.

You can view my articles that refer the interest to entangled issues of ancient, medieval, and early modern histories. https://scriggler.com/Profile/michael_baizerman

These articles belong to four projects: Book 1, Dawn and Sunset: A Tale of the Oldest Cities in the Near East (already published); Book 2, The Enchanting Encounter with the East (in progress); Book 3 (about the quest for the sea passage to India); and an attempt to construct the genuine history of ancient Israel.

My most popular extracts from Book 1 are about the Sumerian astronomy https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Story/21077
and the Akkadian standing army https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Opinion/25017

From Book 2 about the measurement of the earth's circumference https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Opinion/31762
about the spherical image of earth https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Opinion/29106
about the size of the inhabited world https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Opinion/33098
and about the location of Jerusalem on medieval "world maps" https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Opinion/35570

From the project on ancient Israel about Mesha the Dibonite's bid to independence https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Opinion/27980
and about the origin of Israel https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Opinion/26251

Each of these articles attracted more than one thousand readers.

The Enigma of the Antipodes

The concept of the spherical earth adopted by the classical geography included the division of our planet into five climatic segments that were assessed in relation to their habitation. The academics ruled out three latitudinal belts on behalf of their brutal weather conditions. However, they reckoned that the two remaining zones in the northern and southern hemispheres enjoyed the temperate climate and were fit for accommodation, even though their inhabitants would shun one another, sending no vital signs. No ship could stand a chance of crossing the uncharted ocean throughout the whole span of history. Likewise, no person could survive passing through the magic “firewall”, which was hovering over the equator and burning everybody who would dare to approach its fiery confines. Each part of the humankind would linger in the blissful ignorance of its counterpart.

In his poem “Hermes”, Eratosthenes carols this image, placing both human populations face to face and foot to foot: “standing opposite one another, between the heat and the showers of ice; both were temperate regions, growing with the grain... in them dwelt men antipodal to each other.” (3)

The idea of the phantom landmass below the tropics occurred to Crates of Mallus, a distinguished Greek scholar who flourished in the mid-second century BCE, while he was contemplating on the following verse from the “Odyssey”:

“A race divided, whom with sloping rays

The rising and descending sun surveys.”

(-Homer, Odyssey) (4)

Crates, who might have constructed the earliest known globe, realized that Homer spoke about two continents “sundered in twain” by the Torrid Zone. This climatic belt would sit astride the equator, estranging multiple inhabited worlds by the unbroken watery space. The reputation of the Greek national poet stood so high that our literary critic didn’t dare to question the source of the poet’s information. 

Strabo clarifies this hypothesis, which entails the existence of detached landmasses scattered over the face of the earth: “Crates… says that the Torrid Zone is “occupied” by Oceanus and that on both sides of this zone are the temperate zones.” (5)

The theory of plural worlds was one of the insights of classical wisdom. The Greek scientific genius could not be content with the solitary “circle of lands” in the northern hemisphere since such concept insulted the natural sense of harmony. Hellenistic scholars fancied three supplementary landmasses, forming, together with our ecumene, the four symmetrical "corners" of the round earth.

Ambrosius Macrobius, a Roman statesman and philosopher, who flourished in the early fifth century CE, sums up this image, visualizing oceanic currents that separate the people dwelling beyond the tropics and form “two islands on the upper face of the earth and two on the underside.” (6) 

Launching the Medieval Battle for the Atlantic

"The fourteenth century saw the major breakthrough in the exploration of the ocean. During the fifty-year period, major archipelagos of the Central Atlantic were discovered and mapped. The Little Age of Discovery was unfolding..." 

This is the promo fro my new article which I published at https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Opinion/71178 

I have decided to move a range of excerpts about maritime explorations to a font of materials for my third book. This makes them available for publication even though my work on the second book is going on. 

I claim that the Age of Discovery had a "younger brother", a period starting with the tail end of the 13th century (the expedition of Vivaldi brothers to India) through the most part of the 14th century, when almost all islands in the Central Atlantic (the Canaries, the Madeiras, and the Azores) had been identified. I make use of the evidence from a series of portolan charts, from Angelino Dulceti to Abraham Cresque, and a pseudo travelog the “Libro del conosciemento” [“The Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms”].  

Meanwhile, I keep working on another chapter from my second book, The Enchanting Encounter with the East. My next extract deals with the Antipodes, a conjectured land below the tropics. I have collected much more evidence than what I have published already (the original version is available at 
https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Opinion/37535
and I am currently assessing my new findings. I very much hope that I am through until the end of July. 

I'd like to thank my Russian readers of this blog. I wish you left some comments which will help me build a new channel of communication making my writing relevant to you.