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Timeline of knowledge-representation (part one, to 1599)

13,700,000,000 BC: universe expands according to human-comprehensible laws (past configurations will be deducible via 'natural signs') (the idea of uniform natural laws dates to 440BC, rediscovered 1592; idea of expansion from a big bang to 1927)

4,200,000,000 BC: primordial-soup 'selects' most stable molecules (chemical evolution)

some relatively-stable molecules catalyse reactions that partially reproduce themselves

RNA ribozymes eventually catalyse full self-reproduction? [info] [more]

translator-RNA converts DNA-patterns to amino-acid patterns (code cracked 1953)

DNA provides symbolic memory of useful proteins ('useful' = statistically avoids death-situations)

classes of utility will include: acquiring/assimilating nourishment, eliminating waste, avoiding/resisting danger, selecting/winning best mates (at most 100,000 genes in human genome)

many early successes will be inherited by all subsequent life (ie, universals: list)

cell membranes, chemical differentiation of self and other

promiscuous DNA-swapping statistically avoids DNA-'death'

adaptation to daily and yearly cycles in environment

3,500,000,000 BC: cyanobacteria [info]

sexual reproduction (selective DNA-sharing) probably flourishes because 'moving target' is harder for parasites to adapt to (will also select for taboos on inbreeding)

cellular subsystems evolve to slice-and-dice nucleic-acid strings; junk-DNA begins accumulating

1,600,000,000 BC? animals diverge from plants [cite]

1,000,000,000 BC: reflexes are behavior-patterns triggered by stimulus-patterns (mutations explore wide range of variants)

habituation of reflexes to continual stimuli

mental-models begin to evolve, to very-imperfectly anticipate natural events. (the 1st psychological theory of mental models won't be proposed until 1943, by analogy with early computers.)

(modeled events must include anticipations of one's own reactions-- self-image)

appetites evolve that direct organisms toward needed resources, with symbolic representation of priorities allowing appropriate choices among them (classification of motives goes back at least to Aristotle's Rhetoric)

'waxy' (impressionable) memory molecules start each generation from a tabula rasa (of sorts) (1st possibility of error-correction?)

conditioned reflexes (Pavlov 1927)

mental maps allow navigation in space (home/away distinction, intuition of distance)

'thinking' explores relationships among mental objects of various types incl person-place-thing (incl comparison)

"If ever I have seen a fish think, it was in that moment!" --Konrad Lorenz [anecdote]

mental-models generalised and abstracted to be useful in broader range of circumstances (ie, intuition? theory)

600,000,000 BC: mental models include anticipations of other creatures' reactions; differentiation of predator and prey (Darwinian arms-race)

intuitions of number, quantity, size

anticipation of weather-changes

differentiation of kin and competitors, social behavior, territoriality, empathy, obedience to another's appetites, status hierarchies determined by 'mind-wrestling' (psychic territoriality)

care of infants, trust in parents, parent-child communication; modality of 'play' during youth

100,000,000 BC: nonverbal communication via pheromones (linked to immune system: cite) aka 'ESP'?

nocturnal dreaming that manifests 'poetic' (metaphorical) symbolism

vision becomes dominant sense-modality

25,000,000 BC: sex-related Tre2 mutation in primate line [info]

wide range of social structures explored

vocalisations intended to re-align others' divergent world-models (eg warn of danger, inform about appetites)

dissimulation of true intentions

7,000,000 BC: chimp-level society, imitative culture, gesture and facial-expressions, limited tool-use; artifacts that embody intuitive sense of measure

their nonverbal community knowledgebase covers local personalities, kinship relations, local geography, shelter-skills, food and medicine skills, hunting skills, war and defense skills, peacemaking skills

primitive sense of justice, right and wrong

selection for throwing-aim? (intuitive ballistics-- the mathematics would be explored in 1632) 'throwing madonna' hypothesis: [etext]

human sense of smell dramatically reduced [cite]

2,700,000 BC: australopithecus keeps pebble that resembles a face [info]

2,340,000 BC: sophisticated stone tools (homo habilis) [info]

tools characteristically have an 'action' end and a 'user' end. the user-end subtly evolves to fit the human body. (When computers get CRT-displays c1960, the range of these possible user interfaces will instantly leap to infinity.)

it seems possible that each type of tool had a name-vocalisation (cf the cliche of surgeons' requests during operations)

discovery of paternity, father-daughter incest taboo?

1,000,000 BC: homo erectus masters fire
400,000 BC: wooden spears in Germany [passim]
350,000 BC: possible ceremonial burial in Spain [story] [more]
200,000 BC: Neanderthals
150,000 BC: dramatic global warming ends Ice Age
150,000 BC: language-related FOXP2 mutation [info] [paper]
130,000 BC: homo sapiens evolve chins [timeline]

playful exploration of vocalisations, song, rhyme

words used in mind-wrestling (debate, magic, curses)

weather-folklore

memories of the dead lead to idea of surviving 'spirit', impulse to placate restive spirits

mimicry of others (humorous, critical)

tattoos, body-modification, bloodletting?

80,000 BC: probable intentional burial [info]
70,000 BC: geometric scratchings on amber [info]
c50,000 BC? African diaspora; toolkit worldwide will include fire-making, bow and arrow, woven nets, dogs

language slowly extended to describe all important phenomena (intangible social phenomena probably dominate; some domains less amenable to verbalisation) [debate]

storytelling evolves, creation myths, elaborate family-trees
divination employs vocabulary of probable outcomes

moon named/deified, phase-changes noticed; stars given collective name, constellations noticed?

40,000 BC: beads as body-ornaments [info]
35,000 BC: cave-paintings, 'fertility' figurines, moon-phases tracked on notched bones [info] [more] star-chart? [pic]

chisel-flaking technique requires three-handed cooperation

furs/skins for clothing in northern climates

25,000 BC: possible woven fabric in eastern Europe [passim]

spear-thrower (tool) increases throwing-velocity
bone needles
grinding of seeds

idols worshipped as (images of) gods; animal totems

12,000 BC: dramatic global warming ends Ice Age

hypothetical symbolic 'language of the goddess' in southeast Europe [info]

10,000 BC

gradual domestication of animals and plants

design of boats that won't capsize requires theory of center of gravity and buoyancy (formalised 250BC)

8000 BC: navigation of Aegean (limited obsidian trade)
7500 BC: fired-clay pottery
7000 BC: possible depiction of dancing in mideast
7000 BC: possible flutes in China [passim]
6500 BC: possible discovery of prime numbers [bone]
6200 BC: Catal Hoyuk's town map, obsidian mirrors, distinctive seals [pix]

(reproduction)

6000 BC: desertification of Sahara [cite]
5000 BC: earliest trepanned skulls (psychotherapy?) [info]
4000 BC: Egyptian bureaucracy begins to grow up around Nile-irrigation surplus, technologies of propaganda/mind-control

4000 BC: accounting via clay tokens in Sumer [info]
3700 BC: complex symbols scratched on account-tokens [info]
3500 BC: cylinder seals

(Cairo to Baghdad is 800 miles-- one month's walk)

boundaries defined by geometrical surveying
geometry treats length, area, volume (and time, via astronomy)

models of buildings
woven baskets; sickles; looms; wheel; flint-mining; long-distance trade; smelting copper, silver, and gold

domestication of horse by Indo-European ancestors? [language]

3400 BC: 1st writing in Egypt (timeline of dynasties maintained)

700+ hieroglyphics with 'determinatives' for man, woman, people, land, enemy, town, child, god, motion (leg), forward, backward, dead, many [cite]

Egyptian numbers non-positional w/cypherization [def] [history]
Babylonian numbers positional w/o cypherization [history]

3300 BC: numerical notation on tablets; cuneiform w/300+ signs
3300 BC: Iceman carries antibiotic mushrooms [info]
3200 BC: astronomical megalith at Newgrange, Ireland
3000 BC: soap in Egypt
3000 BC: credit-system in Sumer [passim]
3000 BC: water clocks in China
3000 BC: 1st candles
3000 BC: dice for gambling (intuitions of probability) [cite]
2800 BC: epic of Gilgamesh
2800 BC: systematic astronomical observations [cite]
2800 BC: Egyptian lunar calendar of 365 days
2800 BC: construction of pyramids requires engineering, management, and accounting

2500 BC

2500 BC: depictions of surgery in Egypt [cite]
2500 BC: 1st court jester [cite]
2500 BC: papyrus and ink for writing

red ink indicates headings, new paragraphs
autobiographical coffin-texts in Egypt enumerate good deeds [cite]

2300 BC: Instructions of Ptahhotep (early wisdom literature) [etext] early poetic meter? [cite]

"Your every utterance should be outstanding, so that the mighty men who listen to you will say: 'How beautiful are the words that fly from his lips.'"

tax rolls, contracts, wills, banking
archives of duplicate correspondence
armies require increasingly sophisticated record-keeping

Aegean sea-trade (oil, wine, opium?)

2200 BC: Stonehenge (astronomical megalith) [info]
2100 BC: legal texts in Ur [cite]
2100 BC: instability in Egypt redefines govt and religion, emphasizing responsibility [cite]
2000 BC: Egyptians estimate pi as 3 [cite]
2000 BC: Babylonian table of squares and cubes [info] [more]
2000 BC: earliest sails; Minoan 'palaces' w/1st bathtub
1900 BC: Sinuhe of Egypt's autobiography [etext]

"I heard his voice, as he spoke, while I was in the near distance. My heart fluttered, my arms spread out, a trembling befell all my limbs. I removed myself in leaps, to seek a hiding place. I put myself between two bushes, so as to leave the road to its traveler."

1850 BC: original of Rhind papyrus (geometry, algebra-puzzles using fractions) [info]

[pic source]

1800 BC: Babylonians calculate square-root of two to 4 decimal-places (equivalent) [info] [more]

1800 BC: Sumerian kinglist (early timeline)
1800 BC: Babylonians know Pythagorean theorem [cite]
1750 BC: Code of Hammurabi (justice-representation) [etext]
1750 BC: signs of zodiac invented in Babylonia [cite]
1700 BC: Babylonian tablet on solving quadratic equations
1700 BC: 1st consonantal alphabet, proto-canaanite [info]
1600 BC: Egyptian 'Surgical Papyrus' describes anatomy of brain [cite]

medical treatises; recipes
magical literature, curses, astrology
wordlists (proto-thesaurus)

1500 BC: earliest known sundial in Egypt [info]
1500 BC: Mesopotamian recipe for glaze written in code [cite]

Osiris as Egyptian savior-god? [cite]

1400 BC: surveyors in Egypt use primitive coordinates
1400 BC: antiquarian researches of Amenhotep III [info]
1350 BC: Akhenaten's artistic revolution (Bek's realistic sculpture) [info]
1300 BC: wax tablets for jotting notes [how-to]
1300 BC: Chinese 'venetian blind'-style books

Egypt's 19th dynasty briefly worships Seth (traditionally evil) [cite]

1250 BC: proto-canaanite alphabet adapted by Phoenicians [info] [pic]
1200 BC: Hierombalus of Beirut writes about Phoenician religion (lost) [cite]
1200 BC: Trojan war? hypothetical ecological collapse in Greece
1100 BC: Egyptian statues with hinged jaws [cite]
1100 BC: library of Tiglath-pileser includes 'humanised' version of Gilgamesh [cite]

weights and balances

1000 BC

1000 BC: 1st known rhyming poems in Chinese 'Book of Songs' [info]
1000 BC: counting-boards in China (precursors of abacus) [cite]
1000 BC: I Ching (binary notation, story-skeletons for divination) [history]

Yin = shady, secret, dark, mysterious, cold
Yang = clear, bright, the sun, heat [cite]

64 hexgrams: Creative, Receptive, Difficulty at the Beginning, Youthful Folly, Waiting (Nourishment), Conflict, Army, Holding Together, Taming Power of the Small, Trading (Conduct), Peace, Standstill, Fellowship with Men, Possession in Great Measure, Modesty, Enthusiasm, Following, Work on What Has Been Spoiled, Approach, Contemplation (View), Biting Through, Grace, Splitting Apart, Turning Point, Innocence (Unexpected), Taming Power of the Great, Corners of the Mouth (Providing Nourishment), Preponderance of the Great, Abysmal (Water), Clinging/Fire, Influence (Wooing), Duration, Retreat, Power of the Great, Progress, Darkening of the Light, Clan, Opposition, Obstruction, Deliverance, Decrease, Increase, Break-thru (Resoluteness), Coming to Meet, Gathering Together (Massing), Pushing Upward, Oppression (Exhaustion), Well, Revolution (Molting), Cauldron, Arousing (Shock, Thunder), Keeping Still, Mountain, Development (Gradual Progress), Marrying Maiden, Abundance (Fullness), Wanderer, Gentle (Penetrating, Wind), Joyous/Lake, Dispersion (Dissolution), Limitation, Inner Truth, Preponderance of the Small, After Completion, Before Completion

dark ages in Greece and mideast [info]
origin of self-consciousness in breakdown of bicameral mind? (Jaynes 1976: review)

Greeks add vowels to Phoenician alphabet
Greek numbering system [history]

950 BC: Tyre's purple dye from murex shells [cite]
800 BC: monotheism emerges in mideast [cite]
800 BC: anatomical models used in India [cite]

Homeric epics (storytelling breakthru; heroic un-selfconsciousness) unrhymed

heroes illiterate: "So into Lycia Proetus sent Bellerophon, charged to bear a deadly cipher, magical marks he engraved and hid in folded tablets." [Iliad] [cite]

language of gods believed knowable: "...the mighty eddying river whom men call Scamander, but gods Xanthus..." [Iliad]

knowledge of Homer unifies greek-speakers

750 BC

Greek democratic ideal emphasizes debate-skills; speeches composed in advance [cite]

750 BC: Hesiod's unification of mythology
750 BC: planetary motions tracked in China and Babylonia [cite]
700 BC: Mesopotamian placeholder for zero [cite]
700 BC: touchstone makes uniform coinage possible
700 BC: 1st aqueduct
675 BC: unrhymed lyric poetry in Aegean region [cite]

"Wayward and wildly pounding heart,
There is a girl who lives among us
Who watches you with foolish eyes..."

650 BC: Phoenicians circumnavigate Africa
650 BC: Assurbanipal's library of 22k tablets on history, medicine, astronomy, astrology [cite]

abacus [cite]

650-500 BC: worldwide 'Axial Age' gives birth to many new religions

Zoroaster posits dualistic battle between benevolent and malevolent divinities (attempting to explain evil, and exhort good)

622 BC: Josiah's book of the law (proto-Deuteronomy-- 10 commandments, 1st Moses myth?)
620 BC: according to Herodotus, pharaoh determines by experiment that Phrygian is original human language [cite]

Sparta innovates mandatory schooling [info]

609 BC: Josiah's quixotic last stand against Egypt
600 BC: Apastamba invents decimal notation [bio] [cite]
594 BC: Solon's lawcode [info]
590 BC: Theodorus invents water-level, carpenter's square, lock and key [cite]
586 BC: Jerusalem burned by Babylonians
585 BC: Thales innovates materialist worldview, 1st geometric proof, 1st celestial globe, 1st astronomical almanac? [cite] [more] [math]

for the Greeks, geometry dealt with continuous lengths and arithmetic dealt with integers-- there was almost no conceptual overlap

580 BC: Aesop's fables [etext]

There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth. (The Boy Who Cried Wolf)

560 BC: Anaximander innovates 1st philosophical argument, 1st world map, 1st book in prose, "Concerning Nature" (lost) [info] [more]

"Whence things have their origin, thence also their destruction happens, as is the order of things."

550 BC: Nabonidus's self-exile in Arabia [info]
550 BC: 1st critical analysis of Homeric texts
547 BC: Croesus conquered by Persians
540 BC: Xenophanes distinguishes world/knowledge/episteme from models/opinions/doxa [cite] [more]

"Sensations are deceptive." [etexts]

534 BC: 1st Greek tragedy-competition (storytelling breakthru)
531 BC: enlightenment of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)

"In reality there is no such thing as an 'I' who helps, and no such thing as an 'other' whom I help."

529 BC: Pythagorean cult of Apollo relocates from Aegean (Samos) to Italy (Croton); believes in reincarnation, harmony of opposites via ratios, body as 'tomb' of soul (morbid dualism) [info]

All things are numbers: 1 = unity/reason; 2 = male/opinion; 3 = female; 4 = justice; 5 = marriage; 7 = Athena/right time

quadrivium of mathematics: discrete (absolute-arithmetic, relative-music), continued (stable-geometry, moving-astronomy)

516 BC: Simonides' art of memory (spatial mnemonics)

500 BC

500 BC: Sun Tzu's 'Art of War' [etext]

"By 'method and discipline' are to be understood the marshaling of the army in its proper subdivisions, the gradations of rank among the officers, the maintenance of roads by which supplies may reach the army, and the control of military expenditure..."

McLuhan credits Heraclitus's notion of 'logos' as properly unifying truth and beauty [essay]

467 BC: 1st manual of rhetoric by Corax (lost)
458 BC: Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy (unrhymed) [etext]

"Now, fretting, chafing in the dark of doubt,
'Tis hopeless to unfold
Truth, from fear's tangled skein; and, yearning to proclaim
Its thought, my soul is prophecy and flame."

Sophists innovate formal study of rhetoric

450 BC: Alcmaeon guesses optic nerve carries sensations to brain [cite]
450 BC: Protagoras classifies sentences as wishes, questions, statements, or commands
450 BC: Damon analyses iambs, trochees, dactyls [cite]
450 BC: Anaxagoras relates advance in intelligence to human hand [etext]

"Mind is the most rarefied of all things and the purest, and it has all knowledge in regard to everything and the greatest power; over all that has life, both greater and less, mind rules"

445 BC: Hippasus discovers irrational numbers
445 BC: Empedocles anticipates natural selection; theory of 4 elements
444 BC: sophist Gorgias teaches "Kill your opponents' earnestness with jesting, and their jesting with earnestness"

440 BC: Melissos suggests laws of nature are uniform everywhere [cite]
440 BC: histories of Herodotus
440 BC: Democritus proposes atom
432 BC: Greek calendar reform [info]
430 BC: Sophocles' 'Oedipus' includes some rhyming [cite]

Athenian political speeches preserved

classic (insoluble) geometry problems of antiquity: square circle, trisect angle, double volume of cube [cite]

425 BC: Hippias discovers 'quadratrix' (1st non-circular curve)
425 BC: Socratic (dialectical) method for investigating ethics-etc; emphasis on definition of terms

McLuhan blames Socrates for divorcing dialectic/truth from rhetoric/beauty [essay]

423 BC: Aristophanes lampoons Socrates in 'Clouds' [etext]

"I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air, which is of the like nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven... Do you always shut your thoughts within yourself? Let your ideas fly in the air, like a may-bug, tied by the foot with a thread."

'ecstasy' means standing outside oneself [Perseus]

Ezra's Torah reconciles divergent Jerusalem and Babylonian texts

And YHWH said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech."

400 BC: catapult
400 BC: Hippocratic theory of 4 humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood [cite]

"Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears." [cite]

(if Plato had used it instead as a metaphor for mental-models, millennia of confusion might have been avoided!)

370 BC: Eudoxus's method of exhaustion for calculating areas and volumes (eg cone) [bio]
360 BC: Plato's ideal of unchanging forms [etexts]

5 principles: being, identity, divergence, motion, rest

"Assume, then, for the sake of argument, that there is in our souls a block of wax... and that whenever we wish to remember anything we see or hear or think of in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions and thoughts and imprint them upon it, just as we make impressions from seal rings; and whatever is imprinted we remember and know as long as its image lasts" Theaetetus

"The substance which is to be fitted to receive frequently over its whole extent the copies of all things intelligible and eternal should itself, of its own nature, be void of all the forms" Timaeus

"A name is an instrument of teaching and of distinguishing natures... The work of the legislator is to give names, and the dialectician must be his director if the names are to be rightly given... to express the true forms of things in letters and syllables... The first imposers of names must surely have been considerable persons; they were philosophers, and had a good deal to say." Cratylus

"Written characters are not truth, but only the semblance of truth." Phaedrus

"Among men all things depend upon three wants and desires... eating and drinking... and the fire of sexual lust." Republic

"The knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal." Republic

360 BC: Diogenes 1st Cynic, rejects all conventions
360 BC: Praxiteles' sculpture (realism breakthru)
350 BC: Heraclides guesses rotation of Earth, solar-orbits of Venus and Mercury [cite]
350 BC: Menaechmus discovers conics (ellipse, parabola, hyperbola-- inspired by shadows/perspective?)
345 BC: Speusippus attempts encyclopedia
340 BC: Ephorus's 29-volume universal history
334-323 BC: Aristotle's pupil Alexander conquers world
331 BC: library at Alexandria
330 BC: Aristotle surveys all knowledge, classifies personal library; invents logic ('analysis') and variables, places logic above rhetoric; speculates that each class of object has its own pre-defined natural (vs 'violent') motions; groups 500 animal species into 8 classes, proposes organisms arranged along scale from simplest to most complex [etexts] [linguistics]

"Let A stand for what can be taught, B for knowledge, C for justice..." Prior Analytics

"All men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolise, are the same for all." On Interpretation

"To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world." De Anima

"When we are able to give an account conformable to experience of all or most of the properties of a substance, we shall be in the most favorable position to say something worth saying about the essential nature of that subject." De Anima

"As the hand is a tool of tools, so the mind is the Form of Forms" De Anima

4 causes: material, formal, efficient, final [info]

10 categories: Essence (substance), Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position (situation), State (condition), Activity (action), Passivity (passion) Topics

6 kinds of change/motion: coming into being, passing away; increasing, decreasing; alteration, motion in place [Physics]

virtues (lack, excess): courage (cowardice, rashness), temperance (self-indulgence, insensibility), liberality (prodigality, meanness), magnificence (niggardliness, vulgarity), pride (humility, vanity), ambition (unambitiousness, overambitiousness), good temper (irascibility, inirascibility), friendliness (churlishness, obsequiousness), truthfulness (mock modesty, boastfulness), ready wit (boorishness, buffoonery), shame (shamelessness, bashfulness), justice, intellectual virtues Ethics

uses of rhetoric: exhortation-dehortation, accusation-defense, praise-censure Rhetoric

causes of happiness: good birth, friends and children (good, many), wealth, happy old-age, health, beauty, strength, large stature, athletic powers, fame, honor, good luck, virtue Rhetoric

good things: happiness, justice, courage, temperance, magnanimity, magnificence, health, beauty, wealth, friends, honor, reputation, faculties of speech and action, good parts, strong memory, receptiveness, quick intuition, sciences and arts, life Rhetoric

7 causes of action: voluntary (habit, reason, anger, desire), involuntary (chance, nature, compulsion) Rhetoric

14 emotions: anger-calmness, friendship-enmity, fear-confidence, shame-shamelessness, kindness-unkindness, pity, indignation, envy, emulation Rhetoric

28 topoi: Opposites, Identical results and antecedents, Inflections, Altered choices, Correlative terms, Attributed motives, More and less, Incentives and deterrents, Time, Incredible occurrences, Definition, Conflicting facts, Induction, Meeting slander, Existing decisions, Cause to effect, Turning the tables, Meaning of names, Part to whole, Actions compared, Simple consequences, Course of action, Criss-cross consequences, Previous mistakes, Inward thoughts, outward show, Division, Proportional results, Ambiguous terms Rhetoric [info] [more]

330 BC: Theophrastus catalogs 550 plants [cite]
330 BC: Pytheas reaches Britain by sea from Greece [cite]
320 BC: Pyrrho, having visited India w/Alexander, founds skeptical school (experience is contradictory, all is opinion) [info]

300 BC: Praxagoras diagnoses by taking pulse [cite]
300 BC: Epicurus argues mind is material; knowledge consists of 'preconceptions' built up by experience and applied to perceptions; perceptions can't be false [IEP]

[paraphrase:] Preconceptions like body, person, usefulness, and truth result from repetition of similar perceptions, and can be extended by analogy and by compounding.

300 BC: Zeno founds the Stoic school (dispassionate ideal-- emotions are misleading; distinguishes signifier and signified, proposes that language began with onomatopoea; distinguishes phonetics, morphology, semantics, syntax: cite)

"First comes the impression, then the mind, making use of speech, expresses in words the experience produced by the impression."

300 BC: Polykleitos's acoustically near-perfect amphitheater [cite]
300 BC: Book of Meng Tzu (Mencius) emphasizes 4 principles: benevolence (jen), righteousness, propriety, knowledge [extracts] [more]

"If you fully explore your mind, you will know your nature. If you know your nature, you know Heaven... The common error of people is that they forget about their own garden and try to cultivate the other man's garden. They expect much from others and little from themselves."

280 BC: Zenodotus's critical edition of Homer
270 BC: Chrysippus distinguishes 5 cases for nouns: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, vocative [cite]
270 BC: Ctesibus's water clock [info]
260 BC: Aristarchus of Samos estimates distance and size of moon
260 BC: Erasistratus proposes spirit flows from brain to organs via nerves [cite]

Romans innovate serifs for inscriptions

250 BC

250 BC: Archimedes' mechanical globe, theory of buoyancy, algorithms incl 'exhaustion', 1st summation of infinite series [bio] (plagiarised Egyptians? debate)

appraisal: "The treatises are, without exception, monuments of mathematical exposition; the gradual revelation of the plan of attack, the masterly ordering of the propositions, the stern elimination of everything not immediately relevant to the purpose, the finish of the whole, are so impressive in their perfection as to create a feeling akin to awe in the mind of the reader."

Hellenists innovate mechanics, pneumatics, hydrostatics, medicine, geography (but labor-saving devices still discouraged as disruptive)

240 BC: Eratosthenes measures radius of Earth
240 BC: Callimachus's 'Pinakes' alphabetises authors in Alexandria library [cite]
220 BC: Apollonius names the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola; invents epicyclic model of planets [cite]
200 BC: ox-powered irrigation wheel [cite]
173 BC: Rome bans philosophers and teachers of rhetoric
165 BC: Book of Daniel fabricates ideas of messiah, resurrection [info]
160 BC: Cato's manual on farm-management [etext]
155 BC: Athenean philosophers win Rome's respect
150 BC: Hipparchus' stereography (projection of 3D onto 2D) enables development of astrolabe; also trigonometry, star-catalog, precession of equinoxes [cite] [info]

Rome manages empire via bureaucracy, roads, and army (army trains with simulated opponents? passim)

Romans innovate cement, dams, plumbing, irrigation, surgical tools, postal services

sudden wealth transforms Roman culture

150 BC: Panini's unequalled grammar of Sanskrit (100s of descriptive rules)
146 BC: Rome conquers Greece, destroys Carthage
139 BC: Jews expelled from Rome for corrupting customs (incl vast magical literature)
124 BC: civil-service exams in China intentionally omit sciences [cite]
120 BC: Dionysius Thrax's 'Art of Grammar' (1st greek grammar, word-morphology only) [cite]

8 word-classes with distinct attributes: nouns (with gender, type, form, number, case), verbs (mood, voice, type, form, number, person, tense, conjugation), participles, articles, pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions

100 BC: 1st poetry anthology, 'Stephanos'
65 BC: Antikythera mechanism simulates planetary motions [info]
63 BC: Tiro's shorthand [info]

60 BC: Catullus uses some rhymes [cite]
59 BC: daily gazette of news in Rome
55 BC: Cicero discusses use of gesture in public speaking [outline]

"Every motion of the soul has its natural appearance, voice and gesture; and the entire body of man, all his facial and vocal expressions, like the strings of a harp, sound just as the soul's motion strikes them." [source]

using slaves as copyists, Roman publishers produce 1000 copies of average titles

50 BC: inspired by Epicurus, Lucretius declares mind and soul are material [etext]
45 BC: Julian calendar w/leapyear [cite]
45 BC: Cicero's 'Topics' builds on Aristotle [info] [legal]

Definition (genus-species), Division (whole-parts, subject-adjuncts), Comparison (similarity-difference, degree), Relationship (cause-effect, antecedent-consequence, contraries, contradictions), Circumstances (possible-impossible, past-future fact), Testimony (authorities, witnesses, maxims or proverbs, rumors, oaths, documents, law, precedent, the supernatural), Notation and Conjugates

Cicero invents latin terms for Greek philosophical concepts

7 species of discourse (adding 'solicitation' to Aristotle's 6): persuasion, dissuasion, praise, condemnation, accusation, defense, solicitation

McLuhan credits Cicero with restoring the pre-Socratic harmony between dialectic-truth-speculation and rhetoric-beauty-action (will endure until scholasticism and printing press) [essay]

34 BC: Varro's 'De disciplinis' 1st latin grammar [cite]
30 BC: Vitruvius's "On Architecture" advocates balance of theory and practice [etext]
10 BC: Horace's "Art of Poetry" [etext]

"Then let your style be suited to the scene,
And its peculiar character maintain."

widespread poetry-fad in Rome

Agrippa's 5 fallacies: inconsistency, infinite regress, relativity of experience, arbitrary hypotheses, circularity [info]

0

0: Strabo's Geography
23 AD: Liu Hsin classifies books in China [cite]
25 AD: Claudius's "How to Win at Dice" 1st theory of gambling [cite]
30 AD: Jesus rejects Jewish purity-code [faq]
45 AD: Paul touts otherworldly reward for obedience
60 AD: Heron's school of technology in Alexandria [cite]
61 AD: Petronius's Satyricon (1st novel) [etext]

"Then after a while this windy, extravagant deluge of words invaded Athens from Asia, and like a malignant star, blasting the minds of young men aiming at lofty ideals, instantly broke up all rules of art and struck eloquence dumb..."

Roman prose becoming self-consciously literary

70 AD: Pliny the Elder's 39-volume universal encyclopedia
77 AD: 1st abstracts of literature, for Pliny [cite]
90 AD: Quintilian's synthesis of rhetoric [outline]

medical specialization peaks

pre-kabbalistic "Sefer Yezira"

knowledge of cuneiform lost

105 AD: paper invented in China [cite]
150 AD: Apollonius Dyscolus analyses greek syntax [cite]
150 AD: Ptolemy synthesizes astronomical knowledge in "Mathematike Syntaxis" (also trig, geography) [cite]
175 AD: Galen proposes 3 brain-ventricles specialised for imagination, reason, memory [cite]
180 AD: Hermogenes' seven types of style: clarity, grandeur, beauty, rapidity, character, sincerity, force; 13 types of issue [cite] [cite] [review]

possible ouija board (Pergamon disk) [info]

200 AD: Clement's 'Stromata' explores metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche [etext]
230 AD: Origen's 'Hexapla' (lost) compares six versions of Old Testament [cite]
230 AD: 1st Roman actuarial table [cite]
250 AD: Diophantus innovates symbolic algebra [cite]

neoplatonism [phil]

250 AD: Plotinus's 'Enneads' add 'mind' to Plato's 5 principles (6 'primals'): mind, being, identity, difference, motion, rest [etext]

260 AD: 1st tree-diagram by Porphyry [bio] [cite] substance, spirit-body, mineral-living, plant-animal, beast-human [pic]

1514 version

books (codex format) replacing scrolls

encyclopedic movement incl Solinus's 'Polyhistory'

271 AD: 1st magnetic compass in China [cite]
320 AD: Pappus synthesizes geometrical and mechanical knowledge [cite]
354 AD: Donatus inspires the neologism 'parse' [cite] [more]

14 metaplasms: prosthesis, epenthesis, paragoge, aphaeresis, syncope, apocope, ectasis, systole, diaeresis, episynaliphe, synaliphe, ecthlipsis, antitbesis, metathesis [latin]

13 tropes: metaphor, catachresis, metalepsis, metonymy, antonomasia, epitheton, synecdoche, onomatopoeia, periphrasis, hyperbaton, hyperbole, allegory, homoeosis [etext]

17 figures: prolepsis, zeugma, hypozeuxis, syllepsis, anadiplosis, anaphora, epanalepsis, epizeuxis, paronomasia, schesis onomaton, parhomoeon, homoeoptoton, homoeoteleuton, polyptoton, hirmos, polysyndeton, dialyton [etext]

12 errors: barbarism, solecism, acyrologia, cacemphaton, pleonasm, perissology, macrology, tautology, eclipse, tapinosis, cacosyntheton, amphiboly [etext]

latin-speaking West loses touch with greek-speaking East

Catholic interpretation of Bible declared official truth (pagan science viewed with distrust; creative thought discouraged for a millennium)

Calcidius's latin translation of Timaeus will be the West's main source for Plato

'Vergil Augusteus' 1st manuscript with decorative initial letters

rhyming hymns in latin

394 AD: last known use of Egyptian hieroglyphics [cite]
400 AD: Augustine's 'Confessions' 1st serious autobiography
400 AD: Nemesius's 'cell doctrine' (brain functions incl imagination, fantasy, judgment, thought, reason, memory, attention, common sense) [cite]

410 AD: earliest alchemical explorations [cite]
425 AD: university founded at Constantinople [cite]

(were profs in early universities expected to defend their expertise against all comers? ie, open-door vs privilege?)

426 AD: Augustine's salvation-oriented, neoplatonic world-model
450 AD: Priscian's "Grammatical Categories" [cite]
450 AD: oldest image of yin-yang, on Roman shield [cite]

500 AD

500: Boethius translates Aristotle, advocates education via introductory 'trivium' (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and advanced 'quadrivium' (music, math, geometry, astronomy); splits philosophy into theoretical (math, physics, metaphysics) and practical (ethics, politics, household management); invents literary form 'prosimetrum'

Arabic rhyming verse; "1001 Arabian Nights"

529: Benedict's christian work-ethic "Inactivity is an enemy of the soul"
533: John Philoponus challenges Aristotle's dynamics and cosmology
540: Simplicius's commentary on Aristotle's "De Caelo" argues that the mathematical astronomer's task is to 'save the phenomena' (preserve appearances) [bio]

550: Chinese block-printing
550: India invents the zero
600: chess evolving in India [info]
601: Chinese table of rhymes [cite]
609: Mohammed starts composing Koran

[attributed:] "The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr."

628: Brahmagupta explores zero, negative numbers, fractions [info]
650: 1st Arabic grammar [info]

1st Sufi mystics in Persia
Arabic musical notation includes note-durations
Arab world rediscovers greek classics via Syrian neoplatonists

700: Zen Buddhism founded in China (anti-doctrine) [cite]
700: Bede promotes BC/AD dating scheme, nature governed by laws
750: musical notation in Europe
750: Al Yahmadi's book on cryptography [cite]
750: Abu Hayyan 'father of chemistry' prepares various acids, innovates distillation, crystallisation (also spiritual alchemy) [cite]

prohibited from representing human figures, Islamic artists explore geometric motifs

789: Charlemagne standardises on Alcuin's 'Carolingian miniscule' as official letter-forms of empire (early lowercase) [info]

inexpensive paper becomes available thruout Islamic world
Islamic library-classification schemes [cite]
Masha'allah investigates theory of commodity prices
Islamic pharmacies offer carefully measured doses of purified drugs

800: candle clock
800: Synkellos's universal chronology [extracts]
825: Al Khwarizmi compiles 1st trig tables; his "Numerals of the Indians" will lend his name to algorithms [cite]

830: Baghdad's House of Wisdom sponsors translation of world literature
840: oldest chess problem [info]
850: gunpowder discovered in China
860: Erigena's neoplatonic "De Divisione Naturae" [cite]

"True reason, since it rests on its own strength, needs no reinforcement by any authority."

"We perceive only accidents, not essences."

868: 11May: Chinese printed-book of Diamond Sutra [pix]
880: chess notation using coordinates [info]
900: al-Battani's precise astronomical measurements, criticises Aristotle
900: al-Razi anticipates conditioned-reflex theory
920: al-Farabi explores role of math in quadrivium
969: earliest known playing-cards in China
976: Hindu-Arabic numerals reach Spain [cite]

Ibn Sahl calculates ideal lens-shapes

no-date: books use cursive script, alphabetical keywords, subject-indexing, underlining and varying letter-sizes to highlight commentary and section-divisions [cite]

European agriculture adopts heavy plow with harnessed horses, open fields, three-year crop-rotation (increased use of wood and leather)

water mills used for irrigation, grinding, sawing, etc

1000

Helperic's astronomical tables, 'Computus'

1000: Gerbert's labelled abacus
1000: polymathic al-Biruni's "Vestiges of the Past" (comparative religion)

"We must clear our minds of all causes that blind people to the truth-- old custom, party spirit, personal rivalry or passion, the desire for influence."

1020: Avicenna's Islamic aristotelian synthesis advocates reconciling theory and practice (but rates philosophy above empiricism)
1025: Guido's musical staff (1st 'graph'), 'Gam' musical scale [info]
1030: Alhazen rejects Greek theory that eyes project rays
1050: Lady Murasaki's "Tale of Genji" (storytelling breakthru) [etext]

"I felt just a little shy, but told myself that the sleet melting from my coat should melt her resentment."

1060: Michael Psellus at University of Constantinople advocates reason and science for the explanation of facts [cite]

board-game 'Rithmomachia' based on number-theory [rules]

1086: 1st use of word 'engineer' (ingeniator)
1086: Domesday Book (detailed tax census) lists 5000 water-mills in Britain [etext]
1088: University of Bologna (1st European university)
1098: Cistercian monastic order synthesizes self-sufficient domestic efficiency based on water-mill
1100: Piscan Document (1st systematic bookkeeping) [cite]
1120: Abelard's "Yes and No" (Sic et non) collates balanced quotes on 157 theological questions

"The first key to wisdom is assiduous and frequent questioning, for by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth."

Adelard scours Mediterranean for Arabic texts, translates Euclid into latin

1121: Abelard castrated for affair with Heloise [info]
1125: Theophilus 1st surveys technology [info]
1126: Adelard translates Arabic trig tables, astronomy tables
1128: Hugh's 'Didascalion' explores theory of reading, encyclopedic ideal, active labor as redemptive [Illich]

[paraphrase:] The aim of reading is to construct a treasure chest (arca) of knowledge within the heart. [cite]

four branches of philosophy: theoretical (theology, math, physics), practical (ethics, economics, politics), mechanical (fabric-making, weapons-making, commerce, farming, hunting, medicine, theater), logic (grammar, logic, rhetoric)

1130: Adelard's "Quaestiones naturales" praises Islamic sciences over Christian authority

William of Conches allows matter to exhibit activity/passivity, mixing, tension, rational causality

"In all things a reason must be sought... Show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so."

guilds of artisans innovate urban middle-class (financial incentive for innovation)

idea of 'nature' re-emerges

1145: al-Khwarizmi's Algebra translated into latin
1150: checkers invented in France [info]
1150: distillation of alcohol in Salerno
1150: Helias's 'speculative grammar' grounded in metaphysics
1160: Ptolemy's Almagest translated into latin
1160: English tally sticks (versatile bookkeeping system) [cite] [more]
1170: Moses Maimonides codifies Talmudic law
1173: 'algebraic' chess notation [info]
1182: 1st rhyming European poetry by Conon de Bethune
1190: Maimonides' "Guide to the Perplexed" tries to reconcile Judaism and aristotelianism

[paraphrase:] Since reason was implanted in man by God, it cannot be contrary to God's revelation.

1190: Averroes ('the Commentator') explicates Aristotle, rates revealed religion below philosophy
1190: kabbalist 'Book of Light' (pseudo-mathematical mysticism)

al-Hassar writes fractions with horizontal divider [info]

Islam suppresses critical scholarship

1st complete latin translation of Aristotle's Physics; other works translated by Grosseteste

Grosseteste advocates mathematical substructure of nature

1200

Incan quipu

1202: Fibonacci's "Book of the Abacus" promotes Arabic numerals [bio] [cite]

1210: Parisian bishops forbid reading of Aristotle
1214: Oxford University founded, led by aristotelian and neoplatonist Grosseteste
1220: Sacrobosco's astronomy text [etext] [bio] [bio]
1227-1492: Inquisition executes heretics
1232: Grosseteste's astronomical tables 'Computus'; also experiments with lenses and mirrors [bio]
1240: Roger Bacon finds Paris too logicist/metaphysical compared to Oxford's scientific orientation (skeptics in Paris follow Averroes)

Frederick II's exemplary "Art of Hunting with Birds" [info]

encyclopedic movement

1245: William of Sherwood's 4 properties of terms: signification, supposition, copulation, appellation [cite]
1247: Ch'in Chiu-shao's "Nine Chapters of Mathematics" includes matrix techniques
1250: Baltic traders improve ship designs
1250: Lambert of Auxerre's 5 properties of terms: supposition, appellation, restriction, distribution, relation [cite]

Albertus Magnus's botanical researches, exhaustive paraphrase of Aristotle

distillation of nitric, sulphuric, and hydrochloric acids opens new doors for alchemists

1260: Franco's measured meters for polyphony [cite]; musical combinatorics [cite]
1260: Roger Bacon formulates empirical methodology [etext]

"Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of the world." [cite]

1266: Bacon proposes encyclopedia of the sciences [cite]

grammar, logic; mathematics, astronomy, music; optics, geography, astrology, alchemy, agriculture, medicine, experimental science; metaphysics, morals

1268: Bacon's "Opus maius"

7 treatises: On ignorance and error; philosophy and theology; foreign languages; mathematics; optics; experimental science; moral philosophy

4 causes of error: unworthy authority, established custom, ignorant crowd, hiding ignorance under show of wisdom (cf al-Biruni, 1000AD above)

1270: Aquinas's "Summa Theologica" (aristotelian theological system building on Maimonides, debating Averroes) [Cath] [etext] (also 1st limerick: cite)

"If the intellectual soul were composed of matter and form, the forms of things would be received into it as individuals, and so it would only know the individual." [I.75.5]

1279: 1st glass mirror
1285: verge-and-foliot system permits mechanical clockworks
1285: Titivillus 'patron demon' of typos [history]
1295: kabbalistic 'Zohar'

Crown, Intuition, Wisdom, Power, Love, Beauty, Majesty, Endurance, Foundation, Kingdom/Earth [info] (missing virtues: truth, justice, courage, humility?)

1296: birth of cartography (portolan map)
1296: William of St Cloud stresses importance of observation in astronomy

double-entry bookkeeping in Italy [cite]

Duns Scotus concludes that reason is irrelevant to faith (inspires neologism 'dunce')

1298: Marco Polo's 'Travels'
1299: Florence temporarily outlaws Hindu numerals

1300

1st cannons smash castles

Roman interest in the ancient city revives [info]

1303: Peter of Abano re-asserts brain is source of nerves
1307: Raymond Lully's combinatorial metaphysics 'Ars Magna' [pic] [info] [comp sci] ditto

goodness, greatness, duration, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth, glory, difference, concordance, contrariety, beginning, middle, end, majority, equality, minority

1314: Dante's Inferno (multi-level ethical classification) [info]

increasingly bad: lustful, gluttonous, avaricious, prodigal, wrathful, sullen, heretics, violent, suicides, squanderers, blasphemers, sodomites, usurers, frauds, panderers, seducers, flatterers, simonists, magicians, barrators, hypocrites, thieves, fraudulent counselors, sowers of scandal and schism, falsifiers, traitors

1340: earliest use of term 'million' [cite]
1347: Ockham's Razor; nominalism denies real existence of abstract forms; hypothesis of supraverbal mental language [cite] [more] only two categories: substance and quality

"A relation is an intention in the mind, signifying several absolute things... I say that 'mutation' is not something, because there is no such thing."

1370? Oresme's coordinate geometry (via 'latitudes' and 'longitudes'), proposes graphs [bio] fractional exponents [cite]

lacemaking requires complex 'program' of steps

1400

1400: earliest tarot decks [history]

22 major arcana: Fool, Magician, High Priestess, Empress, Emperor, Chariot, Lovers, Hierophant, Strength, Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice, Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, Devil, Tower, Star, Moon, Sun, Judgment, World

1404: 18Feb: Leone Battista Alberti born in Genoa [bio] [math]

self-description: "Nothing pleases me so much as mathematical investigations and demonstrations, especially when I can turn them to some useful practice as Battista here did, who drew from mathematics the principles of perspective, and also his amazing propositions on the moving of weights." [cite]

statistical thinking evolving in Italy [Burckhardt]

1406: Italian edition of Ptolemy includes spherical map projection
1413: dolls with movable arms
1418: Brunelleschi uses model to design largest-ever dome [story] [site]

1425: earliest use of percent sign (%) [cite]
1433: Jan van Eyck's realistic self-portrait [pic]
1433: Alberti's mathematical survey of Roman ruins [info]
1435: Alberti treats perspective geometrically; theory of gestures; mechanical analysis of bodyparts [etext]

"When painters fill the circumscribed places with colours, they should only seek to present the forms of things seen on this plane as if it were of transparent glass... an open window through which I see what I want to paint." [etext]

"It happens in nature that nothing more than herself is found capable of things like herself; we weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, and grieve with the grieving. These movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body... I have noted that the movements of the head are almost always such that certain parts of the body have to sustain it as with levers, so great is its weight." [etext]

1450: Nicholas of Cusa notices cartwheel traces cycloid (1st observed curve)
1450: spring-driven clocks using sprung metal
1452: Alberti's survey of architecture advocates model-building [cite]
1454: Gutenberg's 1st printed calendar
1457: Gutenburg prints psalter with 1st movable type (1M new books in next 50yrs)
1462: Ficino's Neoplatonic Academy, latin translations of Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Hermetic texts [psychology]

1463: 1st title page, for Vatican
1463: Paris innovates numbering of houses
1466: Alberti's cypher disk, for Vatican [cite]
1467: 1st printed index
1470: 1st printed page-numbers
1477: 1st advertising handbills in England

1484: earliest use of negative exponents [cite]
1485: Botticelli's Birth of Venus (neoplatonic/pagan) [info]
1489: plus (+) and minus (-) signs [info]
1490: oldest recorded chess game [info]
1494: Pacioli covers accounting in "Summa de Arithmetica, Geometrica, Proportioni et Proportionalite" [info]
1495: earliest cookbook in Venice

da Vinci's notebooks critique Aristotle [math]

"All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, and that are not tested by experience..." [cite]

"There is no certainty in sciences where one of the mathematical sciences cannot be applied, or which are not in relation with these mathematics."

books devoted to news appear biweekly in Europe

Great Vowel Shift peaks in England (12th-18thC) [info]

1500

a parallel close-up is available of natural philosophy in the 16th and 17th centuries

parentheses (()) invented [math]

1500: Europe adopts decimal notation [cite]
1501: 1st italics in Aldus Manutius's Virgil
1505: Thurn and Taxis 1st intl postal service
1505: Horapollo's 4thC fantasia of hieroglyphic symbolism published (helps inspire universal-language fad) [cite]

vulture = "mother, sight, the end of a thing, knowledge of the future, year, sky, mercy, Minerva, Juno, or two drachmas" [cite]

1506: Trithemius's cryptography manual, 'Polygraphia'
1513: Machiavelli writes 'The Prince' [info] [etexts]

"But to exercise the intellect the prince should read histories, and study there the actions of illustrious men, to see how they have borne themselves in war, to examine the causes of their victories and defeat, so as to avoid the latter and imitate the former..."

1514: 41yo Copernicus privately circulates heliocentric theory [info]
1517: 31Oct: Luther's 95 theses
1520: earliest known playbill in Germany
1520: Ferro's method of solving cubic equations [cite]
1525: 1st use of square-root symbol [cite]
1533: Frisius innovates triangulation for surveying [bio]
1534: 1st printed comma (,) in English
1536: 21yo Peter Ramus shocks the University of Paris [passim]

"Everything Aristotle said was wrong!"

(European doubts about Aristotle will climax with Galileo)

applied sciences: surveying, navigation, medicine, astronomy, architecture, military engineering (and innovative instruments for these) also gambling

Paracelsus proposes 3 elements are salt, sulfur, and mercury; doctrine of signatures [info]

"The stars in heaven must be taken together in order that we may read the sentence in the firmament. It is like a letter that has been sent to us from a hundred miles off, and in which the writer's mind speaks to us."

1537: Durer expands on Alberti's perspective-theory
1537: Tartaglia's gunner's quadrant for aiming cannon, 1st firing tables [bio]
1540: Toriano's mandolin-playing automaton
1541: Mercator's globe [javascript]
1542: Roman Inquisition re-established
1543: Vesalius's atlas "On the Structure of the Human Body"
1543: Ramus forbidden to teach philosophy after publishing critique of Aristotle
1543: Copernicus's "On the Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies" [bio] [extract]

"If the motion of the other planets be carried over to the rotation of the earth and this is made the basis for the rotation of every star, not only will the phenomena of the planets be explained thereby, but also the laws and the size of the stars; all their spheres and the heavens themselves will appear so harmoniously connected that nothing could be changed in any part of them without confusion in the remaining parts and in the whole universe."

1544: Stifel coins term 'exponent' [cite]
1545: Gesner's "Bibliotheca Universalis" abstracts secular literature, classifies 1800 authors [cite]
1545: Cardan's "Ars Magna" innovates negative and imaginary numbers, reveals Tartaglia's method for cubic equations [bio]

cultural shift from secretive science to publication for prestige [cite]

1546: inspired by Lucretius, Francastorius discovers contagious infection [cite]
1546: Ramus's theory of methods [cite]

"The organisation of different things in such a way that the whole subject may be more easily perceived and taught."

Ramus defends applied math against Platonism, studies methods of craftsmen and tradesmen, promotes quadrivium. (Ong suggests the printing press sharpened Ramus's thinking-- but McLuhan regrets this! cite)

1548: Giordano Bruno born in Nola [bio] [bio] [etexts]
1549: Ramus's "Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian" [info]

10 topics: causes, effects, subjects, adjuncts, opposites, comparisons, names, divisions, definitions, witnesses

4 tropes: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, irony

latin translations of Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius raise math-standards

1551: Gesner's encyclopedia of zoology
1551: Thomas Wilson's logic handbook, "The Rule of Reason"
1552: Huloet's english-latin Abecedarium
1553: 1st printed exclamation mark (!) in English
1553: Belaso invents code using passphrase [cite]
1555: 28May: John Dee charged with 'calculating' as a form of magic [cite]
1556: Agricola's "De Re Metallica" synthesizes knowledge of metals, mining
1557: Recorde invents equals sign (=) [info]
1558: earliest known doll's house in Munich
1560: della Porta starts Academia Secretorum Naturae in Naples
1560: Wilson's Art of Rhetoric [etext]
1560: camera obscura allows tracing of images
1561: 22Jan: Francis Bacon born near London [bio]
1562: Ramus converts to Calvinism
1562: Sanchez/Sanctius's 'Minerva' (will inspire Port-Royal school) [cite]

"Latin is logical, and teaches you to think clearly."

early persecution of witches

1563: Cardan's unpublished study of gambling probabilities
1563: della Porta's cypher-glyphs "De furtivis literarum" [info]

[more] [orig]

1564: 15Feb: Galileo born in Pisa [timeline] [bio]
1565: 1st pencil
1566: early newspaper in Venice
1568: Dee asserts every object exerts force on every other [bio]
1569: Mercator map-projection
1569: da Cruz praises ideographic nature of Chinese [cite]
1570: Ortelius's world atlas
1571: Digges' theodolite for surveying and aiming
1574: earliest known bookplate
1574: Clavius's edition of Euclid raises Jesuits' math-standards
1575: Xylander's latin edition of Diophantus (but algebra had already passed him)

Scaliger innovates critical history

1578: della Porta forced by Inquisition to disband Academia
1579: Saxton's atlas of England
1579: Scaliger surveys astronomy from ancients thru Copernicus
1580: Montaigne's skeptical essays promote Lucretius
1580: Bullokar proposes 37-letter english alphabet with diacritics [cite]

1581: Norman's dip-circle measures declination
1581: 1st ballet
1581: Sanchez's "Nothing Is Known"
1582: Simon Stevin's table of interest rates
1582: Oct: Gregorian calendar; 10 days skipped (heightens awareness of astronomical subtleties)
1583: 1st life-insurance policy in London
1583: Raleigh hires Harriot to apply math to navigation, ship-design, and gunnery [bio]
1583: Scaliger's normalised chronology of world history reveals Biblical anomalies ('Julian Day 1' is 01Jan 4713BC) [info] [bio]

3949 BC: creation
2294 BC: flood
2177 BC: Tower of Babel
1941 BC: migration of Abraham
1496 BC: exodus
1181 BC: fall of Troy
1017 BC: Solomon's temple
 753 BC: foundation of Rome [table]

Bacon conceives Great Instauration (scientific renaissance)

"It was esteemed a kind of dishonour unto learning to descend to inquiry or meditation upon matters mechanical."

Stevin overthrows Pythagorean model of musical intervals [info]

Galileo inspired by Archimedes; experiments w/pendulum?

1584: Bruno guesses the sun is a star; ponders philosophical implications of infinity; pioneers the thought-experiment [info]

"There are countless suns and an infinity of planets which circle round their suns as our seven planets circle round ours."

"Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things."

"Here are the signs and proofs whereby we see that contraries do truly concur; they are from a single origin and are in truth and substance one."

Benedetti argues that flywheel disproves Aristotle's theory of motion (Galileo will appreciate this)

1585: Stevin popularises decimal notation for fractions [info]
1586: Camden's topographic survey of Britain
1587: 1st printed asterisk '*' and question-mark '?' in England
1588: 05Apr: Hobbes born [bio] [bio]
1588: Ramelli's 'scholar's book wheel'
1588: Galileo lectures on Dante's Hell (Lucifer 2000 meters tall) [cite]
1589: 1st knitting machine
1590: Galileo's unpublished "De Motu" proposes experimental testing of theories of motion [cite] longshot public demo from Leaning Tower?

Brahe searches for correlation between weather and planets

1591: Bruno writes "He who wishes to philosophise must first of all doubt all things."
1591: Vieta writes 1st symbolic algebra; proposes vowels for unknown quantities, consonants for knowns; also 'coefficients' [bio] [cite] [history]
1592: 23May: Bruno imprisoned in Venice by Inquisition
1592: Galileo re-proposes universal uniformity of natural laws?
1593: Galileo does applied research on rowing, lamp-design, fortification, thermometer, irrigation pump [pic]
1595: Sidney's Defense of Poesie [etext]
1595: Dutch introduce efficient 'fluyt' design for merchant ships
1596: 31Mar: Descartes born in Touraine [bio] [bio] [bio]
1597: Libavius's scientific chemistry
1597: May? Kepler's "Mysterium cosmographicum" promotes Copernican theory, 1st to insist on physical explanations for celestial phenomena

The Introduction to the Cosmographical Essays, Containing the Cosmographical Mystery of the Marvelous Proportion of the Celestial Spheres, and of the True and Particular Causes of the Number, Size, and Periodic Motions of the Heavens, Demonstrated by Means of the Five Regular Geometric Bodies

Camden praises efficiency of anglo-saxon monosyllables [cite]

Kabbalah dominates most centers of Judaism [cite]

next: page two up: intro
this page: 10000BC 1000BC 500BC 250BC 0 500 1000 1300 1500
page two: 1600 1700 1800 1830 1860 1880 1900 1910 1920 1930
page three: 1938 1942 1946 1950 1954 1957 1959 1961 1964 1967
page four: 1970 1973 1977 1981 1985 1989 1992 1994 1996 1999

[rcl] = Reed C Lawlor "Information Technology and the Law" in Advances in Computers 1962 yearbook

Mueller's models

Lehmann's ontologies

Bateman's portal

Hong Kong: science

Caslon media

Nunberg info science

IT timelines

Greenspun MIT

Columbia

Phasor pdfs

Computational linguistics: SWan

classification schemes

crypto

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