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Claudius Ptolemy (Greek: Κλαύδιος Πτολεμαῖος, Latin: Claudius Ptolemaeus; c. AD 90 – c. AD 168), was a Greek - Roman citizen of Egypt who wrote in Greek. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in Egypt under Roman rule, and is believed to have been born in the town of Ptolemais Hermiou in the Thebaid. This theory, proposed by Theodore Meliteniotes, could be correct, but it is late (ca. 1360) and unsupported. There is no reason to suppose that he ever lived anywhere else than Alexandria, where he died around AD 168. Ptolemy was the author of several scientific treatises,
at least three of which were of continuing importance to
later Islamic and
European science. The first is the astronomical treatise
now known as the Almagest (in Greek, Ἡ Μεγάλη
Σύνταξις, "The Great Treatise", originally Μαθηματικὴ
Σύνταξις, "Mathematical Treatise"). The second is the Geography, which is a
thorough discussion of the geographic knowledge of the Greco - Roman world. The
third is the astrological treatise known sometimes in
Greek as the Apotelesmatika (Ἀποτελεσματικά), more
commonly in Greek as the Tetrabiblos (Τετράβιβλος,
"Four books"), and in Latin as the Quadripartitum
(or four books) in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic
astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his
day. The name Claudius is a Roman nomen; the fact that Ptolemy bore it indicates he lived under the Roman rule of Egypt with the privileges and political rights of Roman citizenship. It would have suited custom if the first of Ptolemy's family to become a citizen (whether he or an ancestor) took the nomen from a Roman called Claudius who was responsible for granting citizenship. If, as was common, this was the emperor, citizenship would have been granted between AD 41 and 68 (when Claudius, and then Nero, were emperors). The astronomer would also have had a praenomen, which remains unknown. It may have been Tiberius, as that praenomen was very common among those whose families had been granted citizenship by these emperors. Ptolemaeus (Πτολεμαῖος – Ptolemaios) is a Greek name. It occurs once in Greek mythology, and is of Homeric form. It was common among the Macedonian upper class at the time of Alexander the Great, and there were several of this name among Alexander's army, one of whom made himself King of Egypt in 323 BC: Ptolemy I Soter. All the kings after him, until Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BC, were also Ptolemies. Perhaps for no other reason than the association of name, the 9th century Persian astronomer Abu Ma'shar assumed Ptolemy to be member of Egypt's royal lineage, stating that the ten kings of Egypt who followed Alexander were wise "and included Ptolemy the Wise, who composed the book of the Almagest". Abu Ma'shar recorded a belief that a different member of this royal line "composed the book on astrology and attributed it to Ptolemy". We can evidence historical confusion on this point from Abu Ma'shar's subsequent remark “It is sometimes said that the very learned man who wrote the book of astrology also wrote the book of the Almagest. The correct answer is not known”. There is little evidence on the subject of Ptolemy's ancestry, apart from what can be drawn from the details of his name; however modern scholars refer to Abu Ma’shar’s account as erroneous, and it is no longer doubted that the astronomer who wrote the Almagest also wrote the Tetrabiblos as its astrological counterpart. Beyond his being considered a member of Alexandria's
Greek society, few details of Ptolemy's life are known for
certain. He wrote in Ancient Greek and is known to have
utilized Babylonian astronomical data. He was a Roman
citizen, but most scholars conclude that Ptolemy was
ethnically Greek, although some suggest he was a
Hellenized Egyptian. He was often known in later Arabic
sources as "the Upper Egyptian", suggesting he may
have had origins in southern Egypt.
Later Arabic astronomers, geographers
and physicists referred to him by his name in Arabic: بطليموس Batlaymus. The Almagest is the only surviving comprehensive ancient treatise on astronomy. Babylonian astronomers had developed arithmetical techniques for calculating astronomical phenomena; Greek astronomers such as Hipparchus had produced geometric models for calculating celestial motions. Ptolemy, however, claimed to have derived his geometrical models from selected astronomical observations by his predecessors spanning more than 800 years, though astronomers have for centuries suspected that his models' parameters were adopted independently of observations. Ptolemy presented his astronomical models in convenient tables, which could be used to compute the future or past position of the planets. The Almagest also contains a star catalog, which is an appropriated version of a catalog created by Hipparchus. Its list of forty - eight constellations is ancestral to the modern system of constellations, but unlike the modern system they did not cover the whole sky (only the sky Hipparchus could see). Through the Middle Ages it was spoken of as the authoritative text on astronomy, with its author becoming an almost mythical figure, called Ptolemy, King of Alexandria. The Almagest was preserved, like most of Classical Greek science, in Arabic manuscripts (hence its familiar name). Because of its reputation, it was widely sought and was translated twice into Latin in the 12th century, once in Sicily and again in Spain. Ptolemy's model, like those of his predecessors, was geocentric and was almost universally accepted until the appearance of simpler heliocentric models during the scientific revolution. His Planetary Hypotheses went beyond the mathematical model of the Almagest to present a physical realization of the universe as a set of nested spheres, in which he used the epicycles of his planetary model to compute the dimensions of the universe. He estimated the Sun was at an average distance of 1210 Earth radii while the radius of the sphere of the fixed stars was 20,000 times the radius of the Earth. Ptolemy presented a useful tool for astronomical
calculations in his Handy Tables, which tabulated
all the data needed to compute the positions of the Sun,
Moon and planets, the rising and setting of the stars, and
eclipses of the Sun and
Moon. Ptolemy's Handy Tables provided the model
for later astronomical tables or zījes. In the Phaseis
(Risings of the Fixed Stars) Ptolemy gave a parapegma,
a star calendar or almanac based on the hands and
disappearances of stars over the course of the solar year. Ptolemy's other main work is his Geographia. This also is a compilation of what was known about the world's geography in the Roman Empire during his time. He relied somewhat on the work of an earlier geographer, Marinos of Tyre, and on gazetteers of the Roman and ancient Persian Empire, but most of his sources beyond the perimeter of the Empire were unreliable. The first part of the Geographia
is a discussion of the data and of the methods he used. As
with the model of the solar system in the Almagest,
Ptolemy put all this information into a grand scheme.
Following Marinos, he assigned coordinates
to all the places and geographic features he knew, in a
grid that spanned the globe. Latitude was measured from
the equator, as it is today, but Ptolemy preferred in book 8 to express it as the
length of the longest day rather than degrees of arc (the
length of the midsummer day increases from 12h to 24h as
one goes from the equator to the polar circle). In books 2
through 7, he used degrees and put the meridian of 0
longitude at the most western land he knew, the "Blessed
Islands", probably the Cape Verde islands (not the Canary
Islands, as long accepted) as suggested by the location of
the six dots labelled the "FORTUNATA" islands near the
left extreme of the blue sea of Ptolemy's map here
reproduced. Ptolemy also devised and provided instructions on how to create maps both of the whole inhabited world (oikoumenč) and of the Roman provinces. In the second part of the Geographia he provided the necessary topographic lists, and captions for the maps. His oikoumenč spanned 180 degrees of longitude from the Blessed Islands in the Atlantic Ocean to the middle of China, and about 80 degrees of latitude from Shetland to anti - Meroe (east coast of Africa); Ptolemy was well aware that he knew about only a quarter of the globe, and an erroneous extension of China southward suggests his sources did not reach all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The maps in surviving manuscripts of Ptolemy's Geographia,
however, date only from about 1300, after the text was
rediscovered by Maximus Planudes. It seems likely that the
topographical tables in books 2–7 are cumulative texts –
texts which were altered and added to as new knowledge
became available in the centuries after Ptolemy (Bagrow
1945). This means that information contained in different
parts of the Geography is likely to be of different date. Maps based on scientific
principles had been made since the time of Eratosthenes
(3rd century BC), but Ptolemy improved projections. It is
known that a world map based on the Geographia was
on display in Augustodunum, Gaul, in late Roman times. In
the 15th century Ptolemy's Geographia began to be
printed with engraved maps; the earliest printed edition
with engraved maps was produced in Bologna in 1477,
followed quickly by a Roman edition in 1478 (Campbell,
1987). An edition printed at Ulm in 1482, including
woodcut maps, was the first one printed north of the Alps.
The maps look distorted as compared to modern maps,
because Ptolemy's data was inaccurate. One reason is that
Ptolemy estimated the size of the Earth as too small:
while Eratosthenes found 700 stadia for a great
circle degree on the globe, in the Geographia
Ptolemy uses 500 stadia. It is highly probable
that these were the same stadion since Ptolemy
switched from the former scale to the latter between the Syntaxis
and the Geographia, and severely readjusted
longitude degrees accordingly. If they both used the Attic
stadion of about 185 meters, then the older
estimate is 1/6 too large, and Ptolemy's value is 1/6 too
small, a difference explained as due to ancient
scientists' use of simple methods of measuring the earth,
which were corrupted either high or low by a factor of
5/6, due to air's bending of horizontal light rays by 1/6
of the Earth's curvature. Because Ptolemy derived many of his key latitudes from
crude longest day values, his latitudes are erroneous on
average by roughly a degree (2 degrees for Byzantium, 4
degrees for Carthage), though capable ancient astronomers
knew their latitudes to more like a minute. (Ptolemy's own
latitude was in error by 14'.) He agreed (Geographia
1.4) that longitude was best determined by simultaneous
observation of lunar eclipses, yet he was so out of touch
with the scientists of his day that he knew of no such
data more recent than 500 years before (Arbela eclipse).
When switching from 700 stadia per degree to 500, he (or
Marinos) expanded longitude differences between cities
accordingly (a point first realized by P. Gosselin in
1790), resulting in serious over - stretching of the
Earth's east - west scale in degrees, though not distance.
Achieving highly precise longitude remained a problem in
geography until the invention of the marine chronometer at
the end of the 18th century. It must be added that his
original topographic list cannot be reconstructed: the
long tables with numbers were transmitted to posterity
through copies containing many scribal errors, and people
have always been adding or improving the topographic data:
this is a testimony to the persistent popularity of this
influential work in the history of cartography. Ptolemy has been referred to as “a pro - astrological authority of the highest magnitude”. His astrological treatise, a work in four parts, is known by the Greek term Tetrabiblos, or the Latin equivalent Quadripartitum: ‘Four Books’. Ptolemy's own title is unknown, but may have been the term found in some Greek manuscripts: Apotelesmatika, roughly meaning 'Astrological Outcomes,' 'Effects' or ‘Prognostics’. As a source of reference the Tetrabiblos is said to have "enjoyed almost the authority of a Bible among the astrological writers of a thousand years or more". It was first translated from Arabic into Latin by Plato of Tivoli (Tiburtinus) in 1138, while he was in Spain. The Tetrabiblos is an extensive and continually reprinted treatise on the ancient principles of horoscopic astrology. That it did not quite attain the unrivaled status of the Almagest was perhaps because it did not cover some popular areas of the subject, particularly electional astrology (interpreting astrological charts for a particular moment to determine the outcome of a course of action to be initiated at that time), and medical astrology, which were later adoptions. The great popularity that the Tetrabiblos did possess might be attributed to its nature as an exposition of the art of astrology and as a compendium of astrological lore, rather than as a manual. It speaks in general terms, avoiding illustrations and details of practice. Ptolemy was concerned to defend astrology by defining its limits, compiling astronomical data that he believed was reliable and dismissing practices (such as considering the numerological significance of names) that he believed to be without sound basis. Much of the content of the Tetrabiblos was collected from earlier sources; Ptolemy's achievement was to order his material in a systematic way, showing how the subject could, in his view, be rationalized. It is, indeed, presented as the second part of the study of astronomy of which the Almagest was the first, concerned with the influences of the celestial bodies in the sublunar sphere. Thus explanations of a sort are provided for the astrological effects of the planets, based upon their combined effects of heating, cooling, moistening, and drying. Ptolemy's astrological outlook was quite practical: he thought that astrology was like medicine, that is conjectural, because of the many variable factors to be taken into account: the race, country and upbringing of a person affects an individual's personality as much if not more than the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets at the precise moment of their birth, so Ptolemy saw astrology as something to be used in life but in no way relied on entirely. A collection of one hundred aphorisms about astrology called the Centiloquium, ascribed to Ptolemy, was widely reproduced and commented on by Arabic, Latin and Hebrew scholars, and often bound together in medieval manuscripts after the Tetrabiblos as a kind of summation. It is now believed to be a much later pseudoepigraphical composition. The identity and date of the actual author of the work, referred to now as Pseudo - Ptolemy, remains the subject of conjecture. Ptolemy also wrote an influential work, Harmonics, on music theory and the mathematics of music. After criticizing the approaches of his predecessors, Ptolemy argued for basing musical intervals on mathematical ratios (in contrast to the followers of Aristoxenus and in agreement with the followers of Pythagoras) backed up by empirical observation (in contrast to the overly theoretical approach of the Pythagoreans). Ptolemy wrote about how musical notes could be translated into mathematical equations and vice versa in Harmonics. This is called Pythagorean tuning because it was first discovered by Pythagoras. However, Pythagoras believed that the mathematics of music should be based on the specific ratio of 3:2 whereas Ptolemy merely believed that it should just generally involve tetrachords and octaves. He presented his own divisions of the tetrachord and the octave, which he derived with the help of a monochord. Ptolemy's astronomical interests also appeared in a discussion of the "music of the spheres" (Ptolemy's intense diatonic scale). His Optics is a work that survives only in a
poor Arabic translation and in about twenty manuscripts of
a Latin version of the Arabic, which was translated by Eugene of Palermo (c. 1154).
In it Ptolemy writes about properties of light, including
reflection, refraction, and color.
The work is a significant part of the early history of
optics
and influenced the more famous 11th century Optics by
Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham). The work is also important for
the early history of perception. Ptolemy combined the
mathematical, philosophical and physiological traditions.
He held an extramission - intromission theory of vision:
the rays (or flux) from the eye formed a cone, the vertex
being within the eye, and the base defining the visual
field. The rays were sensitive, and conveyed information
back to the observer’s intellect about the distance and
orientation of surfaces. Size and shape were determined by
the visual angle subtended at the eye combined with
perceived distance and orientation. This was one of the
early statements of size - distance invariance as a cause
of perceptual size and shape constancy, a view supported
by the Stoics.
Ptolemy offered explanations of many phenomena concerning
illumination and color, size, shape, movement and
binocular vision. He also divided illusions into those
caused by physical or optical factors and those caused by
judgmental factors. He offered an obscure explanation of
the sun or moon illusion (the enlarged apparent size on
the horizon) based on the difficulty of looking upwards. There are several characters or items named after Ptolemy, including:
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