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The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year…
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The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (original 2019; edition 2019)

by Violet Moller (Author)

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4441155,737 (3.82)12
"The foundations of modern knowledge--philosophy, math, astronomy, geography--were laid by the Greeks, whose ideas were written on scrolls and stored in libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. But as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed. Yet some texts did survive and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean--rare centers of knowledge in a dark world, where scholars supported by enlightened heads of state collected, translated and shared manuscripts. In 8th century Baghdad, Arab discoveries augmented Greek learning. Exchange within the thriving Muslim world brought that knowledge to Cordoba, Spain. Toledo became a famous center of translation from Arabic into Latin, a portal through which Greek and Arab ideas reached Western Europe. Salerno, on the Italian coast, was the great center of medical studies, and Sicily, ancient colony of the Greeks, was one of the few places in the West to retain contact with Greek culture and language. Scholars in these cities helped classical ideas make their way to Venice in the 15th century, where printers thrived and the Renaissance took root. The Map of Knowledge follows three key texts--Euclid's Elements, Ptolemy's The Almagest, and Galen's writings on medicine--on a perilous journey driven by insatiable curiosity about the world"--… (more)
Member:michaelg16
Title:The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found
Authors:Violet Moller (Author)
Info:Doubleday (2019), 336 pages
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The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found by Violet Moller (2019)

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» See also 12 mentions

English (6)  Dutch (2)  Spanish (2)  Italian (1)  All languages (11)
Showing 1-5 of 6 (next | show all)
Made no attempt not to be opaque and dense. Some books on history really suffer from an inability to access the reader, and this - for me - is one of them. A shame, because it is subject matter I’m interested in and have enjoyed reading by other authors. ( )
  PiaRavenari | Aug 4, 2023 |
A sweeping survey of where, how and why the centers of knowledge continually migrated from city to city during the 1000 years after the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance to places as far apart as Toledo and Baghdad. Each time a city 'fell' or, in the case of Spain, evicted whole groups of people, much knowledge was lost, although some were saved but removed to a new 'safer' city. The main point is that the role the Islamic Empire played in this dance of preservation has been understated in our Western culture. ****

read for my bookgroup ( )
  sibylline | Oct 12, 2022 |
There was a program on PBS when I was in middle or high school that was, I think, produced in the UK...like most really good science programs. The program was called Connections and it would take a subject and connect all the historical dots as to how it came about and sometimes the connections between historical figures, objects, cities, places, concepts and moments would be really obscure. Who knew, for example, that there was a connection between the modern concept of credit and Napoleon's problem of feeding a large army and the development of refrigeration.

The Map of Knowledge is like this.

I found myself riveted.

I, and I think many of us in the public school system in the US, got basic world history in high school. This was usually a discrete set of historical moments that were never really connected for you in the classroom except to know that these things happened in chronological order, usually from some arbitrary oldest topic to some point closer to the present day. There was ancient Greece, Rome, the Crusades, the Dark Ages, Rome again and the rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, etc...

But what you didn't know and were never taught, was how these different historical subject areas were connected and what connected them and why they happened. I will bet few of us had any notion that, but for Islam and the Arab world, much of ancient Greek and Roman history might have been lost and the Renaissance in Europe may have been long delayed.

A very interesting book and well worth taking the time to read. Violet Moller did a huge amount of work for this as evidenced by the bibliography and she really opened my eyes to an area of history I knew little about. ( )
1 vote DarrinLett | Aug 14, 2022 |
A readable book but from a different perspective. The main characters are not human, but books of ancient learning in science, math and medicine. While the development of the story is historical, it is presented as a map, a two dimensional representation of multi-dimensional ideas. From the vanishing of knowledge during the Dark Ages, to the light of Alexandria, the House of Wisdom in Iraq, the libraries of Cordoba and Toledo in Spain, and the schools of Salerno, Palermo and Venice in Sicily and Italy. It is a wonder that any knowledge survived the centuries of first patronage, then warfare and intolerance, but they did.

At the end of our own second millennium, we have also seen the Nazi and Communist destruction of books and censorship in Western and Eastern Europe, the destruction of Aztec literature in the Americas, the destruction of Chinese literature by Japanese forces in Asia and religious destruction in the Middle East.

While in America we are blessed with history of some tolerance, such as Thomas Jefferson's quote: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" we also have seen the destruction of books as Nazi Germany strove to wipe out European Jewish culture with the systematic destruction of books and manuscripts. Yet the humanist idea of the "Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge" is still a powerful force, although often unreckoned.

So the survival of books from ancient times to the present is still a modern ideal, but is also an uphill struggle. It is always easier to destroy than to build, and the Map of Knowledge shows the multi-century attempts to preserve and maintain intellectual ideas. Such basic ideas such as the zero, was saved through the years to abruptly change the mathematics of the world.

A good book and I liked it, although it covers a lot of geography and many new names and places from different cultures and languages. Recommended for private collections of the history of science, as well as for larger public and college libraries. ( )
  hadden | Apr 7, 2020 |
In this book, Moller asks what happened to all the knowledge of the Ancients (Euclid! Galen! Ptolemy!) during Europe's 'Dark Ages'? There were centuries until it all took off again in the Renaissance.
She looks at the different civilizations which eagerly took up the work, even while barbarian tribes were invading the Roman empire...Baghdad and the Moorish colonists of Spain were major collectors of ancient texts. Meanwhile European scholars travelled to distant outposts in search of knowledge...
I read about 2/3 and it's readably written, but there's just SO MANY facts that I found myself forgetting what I'd learned a few chapters back. As a topic that many readers will know little about, the plethora of alien names, centuries of history just felt TOO MUCH! ( )
  starbox | Sep 14, 2019 |
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» Add other authors (4 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Violet Mollerprimary authorall editionscalculated
Demange, OdileTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Vanni, LucaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Woodbine, AnnaIllustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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(1, La grande éclipse)

« Les érudits grecs ont été chassés du monde grec et ils ont participé au développement de la science arabe. Plus tard, les écrits arabes ont été traduits en latin, en hébreu et dans nos propres langues vernaculaires. Le trésor de la science grecque, ou sa plus grande partie du moins, nous est parvenu par cet immense détour. Nous ne devrions pas seulement être reconnaissants à leurs auteurs mais aussi à tous les hommes grâce au courage et à l’obstination desquels le trésor antique est arrivé finalement jusqu’à nous et a contribué à faire de nous ceux que nous sommes. »

George Sarton, Ancient Science and Modern Civilization.
(1, La grande éclipse)

« Vers le début du vie siècle, l’Église chrétienne attirait à son
service la plupart des hommes de talent, pour des tâches missionnaires, d’organisation, de doctrine ou pour une vie purement contemplative. »

Edward Grant, La Physique au Moyen Âge,
trad. P.-A. Fabre, Paris, PUF, 1995.
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À L, E et S, mes trois petites étoiles
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Préface

Au début de l’année 1509, Rafaello Sanzio (1483-1520), un jeune artiste, s’engagea dans la réalisation d’une série de fresques sur les murs de la bibliothèque privée du pape Jules II, dans les entrailles du Vatican. [...]
1
La grande éclipse

Si vous pouviez observer le monde méditerranéen en l’an 500, que verriez-vous ? Un roi ostrogoth sur le trône de Rome, faisant de son mieux pour ressembler à un empereur. [...]
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Fissate nella pagina scritta, le idee scientifiche hanno attraversato il mondo mediterraneo, illuminando diversi luoghi in momenti diversi della storia. Osservando il passato dal XXI secolo vediamo il flusso di quel sapere andare e venire, ne scorgiamo i momenti di accelerazione e quelli di stagnazione, le idee che furono respinte e andarono perdute, per poi essere riscoperte e riabilitate secoli dopo. Non è stato un percorso lineare, ma un procedere tortuoso, con momenti di ripiegamento in cui la conoscenza scompariva, per poi, al giro successivo, ricomparire e riprendere la sua avanzata.
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"The foundations of modern knowledge--philosophy, math, astronomy, geography--were laid by the Greeks, whose ideas were written on scrolls and stored in libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. But as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed. Yet some texts did survive and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean--rare centers of knowledge in a dark world, where scholars supported by enlightened heads of state collected, translated and shared manuscripts. In 8th century Baghdad, Arab discoveries augmented Greek learning. Exchange within the thriving Muslim world brought that knowledge to Cordoba, Spain. Toledo became a famous center of translation from Arabic into Latin, a portal through which Greek and Arab ideas reached Western Europe. Salerno, on the Italian coast, was the great center of medical studies, and Sicily, ancient colony of the Greeks, was one of the few places in the West to retain contact with Greek culture and language. Scholars in these cities helped classical ideas make their way to Venice in the 15th century, where printers thrived and the Renaissance took root. The Map of Knowledge follows three key texts--Euclid's Elements, Ptolemy's The Almagest, and Galen's writings on medicine--on a perilous journey driven by insatiable curiosity about the world"--

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Book description
In The Map of Knowledge Violet Moller traces the journey taken by the ideas of three of the greatest scientists of antiquity – Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy – through seven cities and over a thousand years. In it, we follow them from sixth-century Alexandria to ninth-century Baghdad, from Muslim Cordoba to Catholic Toledo, from Salerno’s medieval medical school to Palermo, capital of Sicily’s vibrant mix of cultures, and – finally – to Venice, where that great merchant city’s printing presses would enable Euclid’s geometry, Ptolemy’s system of the stars and Galen’s vast body of writings on medicine to spread even more widely.

In tracing these fragile strands of knowledge from century to century, from east to west and north to south, Moller also reveals the web of connections between the Islamic world and Christendom, connections that would both preserve and transform astronomy, mathematics and medicine from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

Vividly told and with a dazzling cast of characters, The Map of Knowledge is an evocative, nuanced and vibrant account of our common intellectual heritage.
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