The Librarian Who Measured the Earth With a Shadow
Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.
Read the story →A region
Middle East & North Africa
From Morocco to Iran, from Egypt to the Caucasus.
6 stories from this region.
The Prayer Book That Was a Math Textbook
In 1906 a Danish scholar in Istanbul opened a medieval Greek prayer book and noticed faint mathematics underneath the prayers. It was Archimedes.
Read the story →The Warehouse That Sat Burning for Six Years
On 4 August 2020 the same chemical that destroyed Texas City in 1947 destroyed central Beirut. It had been quietly stored in a port warehouse for six years.
Read the story →The Mathematician the Mob Came For
Hypatia of Alexandria was the most famous philosopher in the eastern Mediterranean. In March 415 a crowd dragged her from her carriage and killed her with roof tiles.
Read the story →The Library That Did Not Burn
Caesar's fire, the Christian mob, the Caliph's order — every famous ending of the Library of Alexandria is wrong, or only partly true. It died slowly.
Read the story →The Lighthouse That Outlived Its Own Civilization
For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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