Ptolemy's Influence On Greek Mythology

Greece began as a small group of brutal settlers known as the Pelasgians. They lived in the forests of Crete and the Aegean, hunted beasts with giant clubs, and lived inside dark, hollow mountains. Since then the Egyptians and Phoenicians have settled in Greece, and taught the Greeks many important skills. Greece became the famed center of art, architecture, philosophy, literature, mathematics, and medicine in the ancient and classical eras. In many ways, the legacy of Greece still lives on in the 21st century. The Greeks influenced many aspects of our lives today. Everything from asking what am I, to creating maps, and discovering how to accurately plot locations on them.

Is the Earth the center of the universe? Is there a more efficient

These were the questions few but Claudius Ptolemy asked. Ptolemy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and lived from about 90CE-168CE. He was a Roman citizen, but an ethnically Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician, astrologer, and poet. Ptolemy’s most famous work “Almagest” was an astronomy book divided into 12 volumes. The book provides evidence for Ptolemy’s theory that everything in the universe revolves around the Earth. In this book, Ptolemy accurately predicted motions and positions of the planets in the solar system. Ptolemy inaccurately estimates the circumference of the Earth at 18,000 miles, vastly underestimating the size of the Atlantic Ocean. This would ultimately lead Christopher Columbus, an Italian born sailor of the 14th century, to believe he was headed for India, when he was in fact sailing to the New World. Who knows what would have happened, and how it would have played out today, if he hadn’t come across North America. Perhaps his most influential book is

Who am I? Were some of the deep and thought provoking questions the pre-Socratics pondered over. Pre-Socratic philosophy is the earliest form of philosophy known to humankind. The philosophy was concerned with answering questions pertaining to the natural world without using myths or religion. Many concepts that we know of today originate from pre-Socratic philosophy, such as “matter, mechanical causality, mathematics, form, and the self”. Thales of Miletus is considered the first philosopher ever. He believed that everything in the universe is comprised of water. While we know today that everything in the universe is made from atoms, and not water, the concept of everything being made of a single material still exists today and influences many fields of mathematics and science, such as cosmology, astronomy, rocket science, and physics. Anaximander, another influential thinker of his time, was a pre-Socratic philosopher that lived from 610-456 BC and was the first person to develop a rudimentary idea of evolution. Anaximander believed that a species would change to fit their environment over a long period of time. He was also the first person to have a perception of gravity and space, which too influences many modern mathematical and scientific fields of study. It is abundantly clear that early Greek philosophy has molded our minds and influenced many widely accepted concepts