(D-1) Space of nature

“Scholars, Priests and Temples“: The international workshop brought together specialists in Late Babylonian, Late Egyptian and Greco-Roman science to discuss methodological issues, and to address the transfer of knowledge between Babylonia and Egypt.
Babylonian mathematical astronomy comprises about 440 cuneiform tablets from the Late Babylonian period (400-50 BCE). A deatilised analysis of the panels showed that Babylonian Astronomers computed the position of Jupiter with geometric methods | Image: British Museum/Mathieu Ossendrijver
World map of Ptolemy: By comparing present-day locations with Ptolemy’s coordinates, certain characteristic differences become apparent; these differences have been used to identify sources and methods used by Ptolemy to determine geographical coordinates.
In connection with the exhibition "Uruk – 5000 Jahre Megacity" the development and circulation of astral science in Uruk during the first Millennium BCE was investigated by tracking the scholarly networks and the cuneiform libraries in this city | © Mathieu Ossendrijver

This group investigated how the exact sciences of the natural world developed in antiquity. The focus was on those sciences that deal with the heavens – astronomy and meteorology – as well as geography and medicine, in Mesopotamia and Greece during the pivotal, transformational period from the 5th century BCE to the 1st century AD

AT A GLANCE

18	Researchers
6	Research Projects
5	Dissertation Projects
48	Publications
5	Events
22	Cooperating partners

The group explored the formative factors that influenced these sciences and the methodological and operational procedures that were developed. It investigated the underlying causal reasoning and the processes by which mathematical theories were constructed from empirical data. A central topic was the innovation of natural science: how and why were scientific disciplines transformed over the course of time, both locally within a given region and interregionally as a result of contact between different communities of scholars. In order to address these questions the natural sciences were analysed as cultural techniques embedded in their pragmatic, institutional, cultic, religious, social and economic contexts. While Space of Nature continued certain topics that were investigated in Topoi I Area D, namely cosmology and theory formation (D-I-1, D-I-2), most of the other topics of Space of Nature were not addressed in Topoi I.

Space of nature

Research Group D-1

Research Projects

Dissertations