Trivium Home School · Language Games
From the mathematicians of Egypt and Babylon to the Museum of Alexandria and the translators of Baghdad: how the ancients measured the Earth, mapped the stars, studied the body and built machines, and how we know, when so many of their books are lost, told by Sophia with Philo, Marcos and Demetria, with grammar at every level and a gamebook for each part.
Every part labels its evidence: books that survive in Greek, books known only from later writers, books saved in Arabic, and objects with no words at all. Like Ancient Philosophy, it compares the Greeks with Egypt, Babylon, India and China, and includes the uncomfortable parts too. All twenty-six parts are now complete.
Lost books, translations, hidden pages and bronze gears.
Cleomedes and the lost book of Eratosthenes, Baghdad’s translators, the Archimedes Palimpsest and the Antikythera mechanism.
Egypt, Babylon and the first Greek doctors and thinkers.
The Rhind papyrus, unit fractions and pyramids, and the Edwin Smith papyrus on wounds of the head.
Counting in sixties, Plimpton 322, and diaries of the night sky kept for six hundred years.
The four humours, the sacred disease that is not sacred, and an oath that was not his.
Strings and ratios, the music of the spheres, and the number that would not be a fraction.
The lagoon of Lesbos, five hundred animals, and the first book about plants.
The Museum, the Library and the great age of Greek science.
Scholars paid by the king, ships searched for books, and how the Library really ended.
Definitions, axioms and proofs: the most copied textbook in history.
The Method, the lever and the sphere, and “Eureka” as a story told two centuries later.
A well at Syene, a shadow in Alexandria, and the size of the whole world.
The sizes and distances of the sun and moon, and an idea known from a single sentence of Archimedes.
Nerves, the brain and the pulse, and reports of experiments on living prisoners.
Ellipse, parabola and hyperbola, and the books that survive only in Arabic.
Pumps, water clocks, a water organ and siege engines.
A new star, a catalogue of the sky, and the slow wobble of the heavens.
From Pytheas to Ptolemy and Galen.
Early maps, latitude, and Pytheas’s voyage to the frozen north.
A traveller of Philo’s own time describes the known world, Alexandria included.
Roman architecture and engineering, and an encyclopedia of everything, written by a man who died watching Vesuvius.
A spinning steam ball, automatic theatres, and a coin-operated machine for holy water.
Surgery in Latin and six hundred plants that healed, or were believed to.
Gladiators, apes and pigs: the doctor who dominated medicine for fifteen hundred years.
The Almagest, the Geography and astrology: one man’s map of the earth and the heavens.
Late Greek mathematics, India and China, and what happened next.
Equations, a riddle of a lifetime, and the last great collector of Greek mathematics.
A father and daughter edit Euclid and Ptolemy, and the end of the Museum.
The Nine Chapters, the place-value zero, and astronomy that met the Greeks.
The House of Wisdom, the translators, and how Greek science came back to Europe.