The Hellenistic World · Part 2 · Alexander’s heirs · B2–C1
Science in Alexandria: The Museum
Part 2 of The Hellenistic World: in the Museum of Alexandria, the Ptolemies paid scholars to think. They wrote the geometry book that was used for two thousand years, measured the size of the Earth with a stick and a shadow, and opened the human body to see how it worked. Prepositions in relative clauses (the angle at which), approximation (roughly, just over, in the region of), and conclude, deduce, prove, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the building at the end of our street, the one most people walk past without looking: the Museum.
The place where old men sit in the shade and argue about triangles?
The place where one of those old men worked out how big the world is, with a stick.
The Museum, the “house of the Muses”, was founded by the first Ptolemies near the royal palace. It was not a museum in our sense, but a community of scholars, paid by the king, who lived, ate and worked together, with gardens, covered walks and a great dining hall. Next to it was the Library, which tried to collect every book in the Greek world, and many from other peoples. Ancient writers give its size as anything from 40,000 to…
The scholars of the Museum worked on poetry and grammar, but also on mathematics, astronomy, geography, medicine and engineering. Many of their discoveries were not improved on for more than a thousand years.
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