Michael Baizerman Author

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 eart...

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: ...

"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, a...