Ptolemy's Ancient Planetary Observations.
The Almagest of Ptolemy (mid-second century ad) contains eleven dated reports of observations of the positions of planets made during the third century bc in Babylon and Hellenistic Egypt. The present paper investigates the character, purpose, and conventions of the observational programmes from whi...
| Publicado en: | Annals of Science Vol. 63; no. 3; pp. 255 - 291 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Jul2006
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=21895308&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 21895308 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00033790 7J1 jtl: Annals of Science issn: 00033790 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Jul2006 vid: 63 iid: 3 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 21895308 10.1080/00033790600625427 ppf: 255 ppct: 36 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 891KB tig: atl: Ptolemy's Ancient Planetary Observations. aug: au: Jones, Alexander affil: Department of Classics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 2E8, Canada su: Planetary observations Astronomical observations Ptolemy, 2nd century Astronomers Egyptian calendar sug: subj: Planetary observations Astronomical observations Ptolemy, 2nd century Astronomers Egyptian calendar ab: The Almagest of Ptolemy (mid-second century ad) contains eleven dated reports of observations of the positions of planets made during the third century bc in Babylon and Hellenistic Egypt. The present paper investigates the character, purpose, and conventions of the observational programmes from which these reports derive, the channels of their transmission to Ptolemy's time, and the fidelity of Ptolemy's presentation of them. Like the Babylonian observational programme, about which we have considerable knowledge through cuneiform documents, the Greco-Egyptian ones were not directed towards the deduction of mathematical models of celestial motion but appear to have investigated patterns, correlations, and periodicities of phenomena. Ptolemy's immediate sources most likely were not the original series of observational records, but treatises by various astronomers of the intervening four centuries, including Hipparchus. While Ptolemy does not appear to have tampered with the wording of the reports, he faced difficulties and uncertainties in interpreting them; critically, he lacked sufficiently detailed information about the ancient calendars to be able to convert the reported dates accurately into his own chronological framework based on the Egyptian calendar. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Annals of Science is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Annals of Science holder: Taylor & Francis Ltd dt: @attributes: year: 2006 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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