Round, Flat, and Egg-Shaped

This post first appeared in my VIZ.arts blog last August, but it seems more appropriate here. Apologies for the duplication.

Outside the Museum in Istanbul

On a recent trip to Istanbul, I belatedly discovered a museum that I’d love to have seen before I wrote my book, Circumference: Eratosthenes and Ancient Quest to Measure the Globe (St. Martins, 2008). It was the Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam, an institution that opened its doors just a few months after the text of Circumference was finished. As the book discussed not only ancient Greek science but its legacy among Muslims, the Museum’s incomparable collection of scale models, drawings, and animations, set in the leafy former grounds of the Sultan’s stables at Topkapı, would have offered a gold mine of information. True, I had consulted Dr. Fuat Sezgin, the German-Turkish scholar who has revitalized the study of medieval Islamic science, and who was the guiding force behind the new Museum. But how much richer my coverage of that era would have been if I’d actually seen his amazing collection before finishing the book.

            I was poring over the exotic time-pieces, astrolabes, armillary spheres, and other antique contraptions when the stranger approached me. He was a Turk, spectacled and dressed in typical Turkish graduate-student style of button-down white shirt and knit slacks. He bore a clipboard, and he apparently was looking for foreigners like me.

            “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “Are you interested in Muslim science?”

            A strange question, given that I had obviously plunked down ten yeni lira to see the place on a beautiful June afternoon.

            “Yes,” I replied, warily.

            “Do you know who first proposed that the earth is a globe?”

            What an odd question to ask a stranger!, I thought. And what luck for him to ask it of me, someone who wrote a book about the man who first ascertained the true circumference of the earth. What kind of luck remained to be seen.

            “I don’t know,” I said. “But the Greeks were first to measure it.”

            My new friend shook his head sadly, as if I were a dancer  attempting a grand jeté who only managed to trip over himself. “It was first in the Quran, that the prophet Mohammad, May Allah honour him and grant him peace, first revealed to humanity the true nature of the universe.” And he began to ruffle through the papers on his clipboard with the evident purpose of finding literature to enlighten me further.

            Now being a native New Yorker who has occasionally been obliged to deal with strange individuals, it’s my instinct to adopt certain modes in moments like this. As this was an “unwanted encounter with earnest devout” situation, the preferred mode has always been “nip the situation in the bud”. So I tried to preempt him by telling him what I already knew about the Quran and the shape of the Earth:

            “I thought it isn’t clear what the Quran says. The language could mean egg-shaped or round, but not necessarily a sphere. It could even mean ‘flat’.”

            He shook his head. “In Surah 79, the Prophet writes ‘And the earth, moreover, he has made like an ostrich’s egg.’ It cannot be denied.”

            Perhaps it was my turn to look at him sadly, for nothing about made like an ostrich’s egg necessarily specifies a spheroid Earth. Strictly speaking, the verse could just as well be describing a flat, ellipsoid one. And indeed, in some translations the Surah reads “…Allah spread the earth out,” which seems to imply a certain flatness.

            But what did it matter exactly what the Quran said or meant to say? “Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth in the third century BC. That’s eight hundred years before Muhammad,” I protested.

            He stopped rustling for his literature. In his eyes settled a certain resignation, as if realizing that he had attempted to crack too tough a nut.

            “It is very good. I thank you,” he said, and smilingly withdrew, possibly to find a visitor with a worse grasp of basic chronology.

            The encounter was brief, but left me with lingering unease. This was not because the man’s argument was so easy to refute—plenty of crazy ideas stand on less firm ground than his. It was because such notions of divine foreknowledge in the Quran, which (I subsequently learned) was notably promoted by a French physician named Maurice Bucaille in his book The Bible, the Quran and Science, take such a different tack than garden-variety science denialism. In Bucaille’s world, the findings of science are not only anticipated by Muhammad and other prophets, but retrospectively approved by them. In a way, it is a far more ingenious way to control science than simply wishing it away. The prestige of science is upheld, but in a conditional way that strengthens the authority of anti-science. If the sphericity of the earth was already there for all to see in the Quran, then the Quran’s authority against stuff that isn’t there is, by implication, all the stronger.

            In a way, this is a brilliant strategy for putting science in a box. After all the efforts to teach creationism in schools fail, and the denial of global warming is finally swept away by the turmoil of our broken climate, might we expect U.S. evangelicals finally to declare victory anyway, because evolution is already in the Old Testament, somewhere (and fill in your cherry-picked chapter and verse here)?

            The overt message of Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam is a celebratory one, proving that in many respects Muslims were once far ahead of their European counterparts. Alas, the subtext is less happy, because it naturally begs the question, “So what happened?” For us in the West, it should offer a cautionary message too, for no scientifically literate society is guaranteed to remain so forever. Five hundred years from now, will somebody open a “Museum of the History of Science and Technology in the West” in New York, to prove to scientifically dominant east Asians that yes, we backward, superstitious Americans once did some brilliant things? The answer to this question surely lies not in our Scripture, but in ourselves.

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro

An Eclipse Without Vampires

". . . the sun assumed the shape of a crescent and became full again, and during the eclipse some stars became visible."

--Thucydides, on the annular solar eclipse visible in Greece on August 3 (July 29) 431 BCE
 

Annular eclipse as seen from Red Bluff, CA, 5/20/12. We drove 200 miles to get into the "totality" zone, where the complete ring (Latin: annulus) would be visible. I took the pictures by taping eclipse glasses over my camera lens.

                                                           
                                                                                                                                                                     © 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

On the Trail of Pompey, the Late Great

To kick off "Meridians and Meditations", here's a relic from the pre-internet days: a travel piece I published in The New York Times on March 14, 1993. 

Plaster reconstruction of the area around the Theater of Pompey (lower left). The chamber where Caesar probably fell is marked.

My aim was not to praise Caesar, or even to bury him. I was simply attempting to remedy the cultural overload of Italian travel by following the advice of the 19^th century English poet and traveler W.S. Landor. According to this authority, there are really only two sights most worth seeing in all of Italy. The first is the so-called Cypress of Soma, near the site where Hannibal and Scipio Africanus first met in battle. The other is a statue of Pompey the Great “at the base of which fell Caesar.” Now my travels would, regrettably, take me nowhere near the celebrated tree (or more plausibly, stump). But my days in Rome would, I thought, surely afford me an opportunity to pay homage to Pompey’s statue. And what could be more thrilling than finding some clue to antiquity’s most celebrated murder, some remnant of that desperate, flailing instant when the conspirators Brutus, Cassius, Casca et al. ended a life of supremely calculated ambition?

            My first stop was the Forum. I assumed that since the stabbing was done by senators, and the senatorial Curia was on the Forum, Caesar must have been done in there.

            No dice. Pompey was nowhere to be seen. Moreover, there weren’t many flesh-and-blood Romans there either. Instead of a descendant of that imperial race, I encountered with an osteopathologist from New York strolling through the remains of the Basilica Giulia. He liked to talk shop, too. Among the tumbled stones ringed with thirsting weeds, we paused, stood, and wondered how to keep old age from ravaging our hipbones.

            We were momentarily silenced before the remains of the Temple of the Deified Julius Caesar, contemplating a plaque that evoked a wild night of post-assassination pandemonium—a pyre built of chairs and tables, a crowd crazed with grief, a spontaneous apotheosis hailed before the cinders had cooled. Back then, this spot was the center of the known civilized earth, and to be cremated in sight of such sacred precincts was an unprecedented honor. “It all happened right here,” the bone doctor breathed, “On this spot, the Ides of March, the guys with the knives, the lending of the ears, the whole show…”

            Or did it?

            I asked around. The question of where Caesar was murdered, alas, inspired many a creative answer among the Italians. Some insisted it all happened in the Forum. Others swore by the crest of the Capitoline. My confusion was finally relieved by some formal research, which established that Caesar met his end in the Portico of the Theater of Pompey, on the Campus Martius, and that this was where Landor’s Pompey statue also must have stood. The fact that the one-time “field of Mars” is now a spaghetti-tangle of one-lane streets, boutiques, trattorias and tenements did not bode well for my quest.

            Sinking, I placed my faith in old Herr Baedeker, with his Victorian ideal of monomaniacal accuracy that demands that every cypress, every cenotaph, every carcass of a fallen idol by faithfully recorded on his maps. Sure enough, according to my copy of the Guide to Italy from the Alps to Naples, 2^nd edition, 1909, south of the modern Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II, near the Campo dei Fiori, there rose in 55 BC a three-storied semi-circular edifice. This was the city’s first stone theater, commissioned by Pompey after his travels in the East convinced him that Rome deserved an establishment as impressive as the ones he had seen in Greece.

            Though much of the superstructure of the theater is long gone, some compensation comes in the form of Da Pancrazio, a gastronomic landmark set in its basement. Examining the place over fine pasta with wild mushrooms  and artichokes, I could glean morsels of history around the re-dressed bones of the arcaded entranceway, the arched and vaulted vestibules that once opened to more than 27,000 seats. The intermission before my tiramisu was an opportunity to peruse the many assassination-related drawings, plaster casts and clippings adorning the walls.

            Still, the good stuff happened in the Portico, not the theater. The former was a colonnaded complex adjoining the back of the stage. Its purpose was pure convenience—to give senators and other important personages a “convention center” close by the centers of trade and amusement.  It was there—not the Curia on the Forum—that Caesar insisted on going despite the warnings of soothsayers and his own wife. It was there that he was quickly surrounded by assailants and, upon the first blow, cried “But this is violence!” It was there, twenty-three cuts later, that he collapsed at the feet of the Pompey, the one-time rival he had defeated on his way to supreme—but short-lived—dictatorship.

            Unfortunately, “there” was no longer there; it is buried under 2,000 years of subsequent development. According to the staff at Da Pancrazio, Pompey resides these days in the nearby Palazzo Spada.

            The trail, I hoped, was getting warmer.

            The Palazzo was a building of modest grace, housing the offices of the Italian Consiglio di Stato and a minor art gallery. A guard informed me that "Pompeo" had been removed to one of the official state offices. I was packed off with an address to which to mail a written request to see it.

            As I was only going to be in Rome for two more days, waiting for a letter to be swallowed, digested and spat back at me by the Italian bureaucracy would probably take too long. Instead, I drafted a letter with the help of Maria Pia, my endlessly patient hostess at the Albergo Albruzzi, and hand-delivered it to the Palazzo Spada that afternoon. As my request filtered upstairs, I was invited to cool my heels in the security police squad room. A guard sat across from me, swabbing the back of his neck with a handkerchief, watching me with a combined air of professional vigilance and nativist dismay at tourists.

            Forty minutes later, I was collected by a dark-eyed young woman in blue jeans. I was made to understand that I should follow this denim Beatrice to the next circle of my Divine Comedy. Soon I was introduced to the Consiglio di Stato's Head of Security--a bald fellow in a crumpled sports jacket, seated a wide desk of burled wood. He was, when I arrived, chatting on one of a half-dozen telephones he kept on a shelf behind a curtain.

            More waiting. This, I judged, was the last test. The Sports Jacket finally turned his attention my way. He glanced at me, Maria Pia's letter, and at me again with an unstated pity for "mad dogs and Englishmen"  After a brief exchange of words with my Beatrice, he evidently judged on the basis of sight that I was not a terrorist, and initialed my request to see Pompey. Of course, it was impossible for this visit to be effected immediately--I would have to come back. "When?" I wondered. "Whenever you wish."

            I set my term of self-banishment at two hours.

            Humbly returning, I discovered my guide would be none other than the suspicious neck-swabber who had minded me earlier. He trundled on well ahead of me, making abundantly clear the magnitude of the favor he was doing me.

Pompey--maybe

            If any mere statue could be worth this trouble, it was the nude colossus in pink marble ringed by the seats of the legislative chamber, posed before a trompe-l'oeil architectural mural. One arm was concealed in swirls of drapery, ending in a massive hand clutching an orb; the other extended outward in a gesture that could have suggested the brilliance of his all-subsuming authority...or maybe just a grab for power.

            Was this, in fact, the same marble Pompey that was Caesar's last vision on earth--a posthumous avenger in stone, stretching forth an arm in triumph over his rival's dying body? There's no visible inscription, no way to be sure. The Palazzo's statue may not be of Pompey at all, but Agrippa (perhaps) or merely some allegorical figure (more likely).

            With the guard shifting his feet impatiently, in danger of sweating, there was no time for such niceties. For my trouble, this will always be Pompey--not because I loved dry facts less, but because I liked a plausible romance more. Even within this strong-room of secular power, I felt W.S. Landor cast his eyes down upon me from his poetical promontory--and smile.

Block marks the spot

Addendum: On a return trip to Rome eighteen years later, I encountered the spot most well-informed Romans believe Caesar was assassinated. It's a spot at the edge of the Largo di Torre Argentina, a complex of four Republican-era temples (and current cat shelter) that abutted the eastern wall of the Portico of Pompey. The chamber where the Senators gathered and stabbed no longer stands, but the alleged spot of the assassination is marked with a block of marble (see photo).  

© Nicholas Nicastro, 2012