Friday, 1 April 2022
The ministry of truth is a thing?
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Byzantium:A brief history.
Byzantium (/bɪˈzæntiəm, -ʃəm/) or Byzantion (Greek: Βυζάντιον) was an ancient Greek city in classical antiquity that became known as Constantinople in late antiquity and Istanbul today. The Greek name Byzantion and its Latinization Byzantium continued to be used as a name of Constantinople sporadically and to varying degrees during the thousand year existence of the Byzantine Empire.[1][2] Byzantium was colonized by Greeks from Megara in the 7th century BC and remained primarily Greek-speaking until its conquest by the Ottoman Empire in AD 1453.[3]
Etymology
The etymology of Byzantium is unknown. It has been suggested that the name is of Thracian origin.[4] It may be derived from the Thracian personal name Byzas which means "he-goat".[5][6] Ancient Greek legend refers to the Greek king Byzas, the leader of the Megarian colonists and founder of the city.[7] The name Lygos for the city, which likely corresponds to an earlier Thracian settlement,[4] is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History.[8]
Byzántios, plural Byzántioi (Ancient Greek: Βυζάντιος, Βυζάντιοι, Latin: Byzantius; adjective the same) referred to Byzantion's inhabitants, also used as an ethnonym for the people of the city and as a family name.[5] In the Middle Ages, Byzántion was also a synecdoche for the eastern Roman Empire. (An ellipsis of Medieval Greek: Βυζάντιον κράτος, romanized: Byzántion krátos).[5] Byzantinós (Medieval Greek: Βυζαντινός, Latin: Byzantinus) denoted an inhabitant of the empire.[5] The Anglicization of Latin Byzantinus yielded "Byzantine", with 15th and 16th century forms including Byzantin, Bizantin(e), Bezantin(e), and Bysantin as well as Byzantian and Bizantian.[9]
The name Byzantius and Byzantinus were applied from the 9th century to gold Byzantine coinage, reflected in the French besant (d'or), Italian bisante, and English besant, byzant, or bezant.[5] The English usage, derived from Old French besan (pl. besanz), and relating to the coin, dates from the 12th century.[10]
Later, the name Byzantium became common in the West to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire, whose capital was Constantinople. As a term for the east Roman state as a whole, Byzantium was introduced by the historian Hieronymus Wolf only in 1555, a century after the last remnants of the empire, whose inhabitants continued to refer to their polity as the Roman Empire (Medieval Greek: Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, romanized: Basileía tōn Rhōmaíōn, lit. 'empire of the Romans'), had ceased to exist.[11]
Other places were historically known as Byzántion (Βυζάντιον) – a city in Libya mentioned by Stephanus of Byzantium and another on the western coast of India referred to by the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea; in both cases the names were probably adaptations of names in local languages.[5] Faustus of Byzantium was from a city of that name in Cilicia.[5]
History
The origins of Byzantium are shrouded in legend. Tradition says that Byzas of Megara (a city-state near Athens) founded the city when he sailed northeast across the Aegean Sea. The date is usually given as 667 BC on the authority of Herodotus, who states the city was founded 17 years after Chalcedon. Eusebius, who wrote almost 800 years later, dates the founding of Chalcedon to 685/4 BC, but he also dates the founding of Byzantium to 656 BC (or a few years earlier depending on the edition). Herodotus' dating was later favored by Constantine the Great, who celebrated Byzantium's 1000th anniversary between the years 333 and 334.[12]
Byzanitium was mainly a trading city due to its location at the Black Sea's only entrance. Byzantium later conquered Chalcedon, across the Bosphorus on the Asiatic side.
The city was taken by the Persian Empire at the time of the Scythian campaign (513 BC) of King Darius I (r. 522–486 BC), and was added to the administrative province of Skudra.[13] Though Achaemenid control of the city was never as stable as compared to other cities in Thrace, it was considered, alongside Sestos, to be one of the foremost Achaemenid ports on the European coast of the Bosphorus and the Hellespont.[13]
Byzantium was besieged by Greek forces during the Peloponnesian War. As part of Sparta's strategy for cutting off grain supplies to Athens during their siege of Athens, Sparta took control of the city in 411 BC, to bring the Athenians into submission. The Athenian military later retook the city in 408 BC, when the Spartans had withdrawn following their settlement.[14]
After siding with Pescennius Niger against the victorious Septimius Severus, the city was besieged by Roman forces and suffered extensive damage in AD 196.[15] Byzantium was rebuilt by Septimius Severus, now emperor, and quickly regained its previous prosperity. It was bound to Perinthus during the period of Septimius Severus.[citation needed] The strategic and highly defensible (due to being surrounded by water on almost all sides) location of Byzantium attracted Roman Emperor Constantine I who, in AD 330, refounded it as an imperial residence inspired by Rome itself, known as Nova Roma. Later the city was called Constantinople (Greek Κωνσταντινούπολις, Konstantinoupolis, "city of Constantine").
This combination of imperialism and location would affect Constantinople's role as the nexus between the continents of Europe and Asia. It was a commercial, cultural, and diplomatic centre and for centuries formed the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which decorated the city with numerous monuments, some still standing today. With its strategic position, Constantinople controlled the major trade routes between Asia and Europe, as well as the passage from the Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea. On May 29, 1453, the city fell to the Ottoman Turks, and again became the capital of a powerful state, the Ottoman Empire. The Turks called the city "Istanbul" (although it was not officially renamed until 1930); the name derives from "eis-ten-polin" (Greek: "to-the-city"). To this day it remains the largest and most populous city in Turkey, although Ankara is now the national capital.
Emblem
By the late Hellenistic or early Roman period (1st century BC), the star and crescent motif was associated to some degree with Byzantium; even though it became more widely used as the royal emblem of Mithradates VI Eupator (who for a time incorporated the city into his empire).[16]
Some Byzantine coins of the 1st century BC and later show the head of Artemis with bow and quiver, and feature a crescent with what appears to be an eight-rayed star on the reverse. According to accounts which vary in some of the details, in 340 BC the Byzantines and their allies the Athenians were under siege by the troops of Philip of Macedon. On a particularly dark and wet night Philip attempted a surprise attack but was thwarted by the appearance of a bright light in the sky. This light is occasionally described by subsequent interpreters as a meteor, sometimes as the moon, and some accounts also mention the barking of dogs. However, the original accounts mention only a bright light in the sky, without specifying the moon.[a][b] To commemorate the event the Byzantines erected a statue of Hecate lampadephoros (light-bearer or bringer). This story survived in the works of Hesychius of Miletus, who in all probability lived in the time of Justinian I. His works survive only in fragments preserved in Photius and the tenth century lexicographer Suidas. The tale is also related by Stephanus of Byzantium, and Eustathius.
Devotion to Hecate was especially favored by the Byzantines for her aid in having protected them from the incursions of Philip of Macedon. Her symbols were the crescent and star, and the walls of her city were her provenance.[19]
It is unclear precisely how the symbol Hecate/Artemis, one of many goddesses[c] would have been transferred to the city itself, but it seems likely to have been an effect of being credited with the intervention against Philip and the subsequent honors. This was a common process in ancient Greece, as in Athens where the city was named after Athena in honor of such an intervention in time of war.
Cities in the Roman Empire often continued to issue their own coinage. "Of the many themes that were used on local coinage, celestial and astral symbols often appeared, mostly stars or crescent moons."[21] The wide variety of these issues, and the varying explanations for the significance of the star and crescent on Roman coinage precludes their discussion here. It is, however, apparent that by the time of the Romans, coins featuring a star or crescent in some combination were not at all rare.
People
- Homerus, tragedian, lived in the early 3rd century BC
- Philo, engineer, lived c. 280 BC–c. 220 BC
- Epigenes of Byzantium, astrologer, lived in the 3rd–2nd century BC
- Aristophanes of Byzantium, a scholar who flourished in Alexandria, 3rd–2nd century BC
- Myro, a Hellenistic female poet
See also
- Constantinople, which details the history of the city before 1453
- Fall of Constantinople (Turkish conquest of 1453)
- Istanbul, which details the history of the city from 1453 on, and describes the modern city
- Sarayburnu, which is the geographic location of ancient Byzantium
- Timeline of Istanbul history
Notes
- "In 324 Byzantium had a number of operative cults to traditional gods and goddesses tied to its very foundation eight hundred years before. Rhea, called "the mother of the gods" by Zosimus, had a well-ensconced cult in Byzantium from its very foundation. [...] Devotion to Hecate was especially favored by the Byzantines [...] Constantine would also have found Artemis-Selene and Aphrodite along with the banished Apollo Zeuxippus on the Acropolis in the old Greek section of the city. Other gods mentioned in the sources are Athena, Hera, Zeus, Hermes, and Demeter and Kore. Even evidence of Isis and Serapis appears from the Roman era on coins during the reign of Caracalla and from inscriptions." [20]
References
- Molnar, Michael R. (1999). The Star of Bethlehem. Rutgers University Press. p. 48.
Sources
- Balcer, Jack Martin (1990). "BYZANTIUM". In Yarshater, Ehsan (ed.). Encyclopædia Iranica, Volume IV/6: Burial II–Calendars II. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 599–600. ISBN 978-0-71009-129-1.
- Harris, Jonathan, Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium (Hambledon/Continuum, London, 2007). ISBN 978-1-84725-179-4
- Jeffreys, Elizabeth and Michael, and Moffatt, Ann, Byzantine Papers: Proceedings of the First Australian Byzantine Studies Conference, Canberra, 17–19 May 1978 (Australian National University, Canberra, 1979).
- Istanbul Historical Information – Istanbul Informative Guide To The City. Retrieved January 6, 2005.
- The Useful Information about Istanbul Archived 2007-03-15 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved January 6, 2005.
- The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 1991) ISBN 0-19-504652-8
- Yeats, William Butler, "Sailing to Byzantium",
Byzantion term remained used for constantinople.
The dominion of mathematics and the design debate.
Unexplained — Maybe Unexplainable — Numbers Control the Universe
In Carl Sagan’s Contact, the extraterrestrials embedded a message in the irrational number pi (the circumference of a circle divided by its radius). But some other numbers are critical to the structure of our universe too — and why they are critical does not make obvious sense.
- Perhaps the most fundamental and mysterious one is the fine structure constant of the universe:
A seemingly harmless, random number with no units or dimensions has cropped up in so many places in physics and seems to control one of the most fundamental interactions in the universe.
Its name is the fine-structure constant, and it’s a measure of the strength of the interaction between charged particles and the electromagnetic force. The current estimate of the fine-structure constant is 0.007 297 352 5693, with an uncertainty of 11 on the last two digits. The number is easier to remember by its inverse, approximately 1/137.
If it had any other value, life as we know it would be impossible. And yet we have no idea where it comes from.
PAUL SUTTER, “LIFE AS WE KNOW IT WOULD NOT EXIST WITHOUT THIS HIGHLY UNUSUAL NUMBER” AT SPACE.COM (MARCH 24, 2022)
Many famous scientists have reflected on 1/137:
The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) famously thought so, saying there is a number that all theoretical physicists of worth should “worry about”. He called it “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man”…
What’s special about alpha is that it’s regarded as the best example of a pure number, one that doesn’t need units. It actually combines three of nature’s fundamental constants – the speed of light, the electric charge carried by one electron, and the Planck’s constant, as explains physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies to Cosmos magazine. Appearing at the intersection of such key areas of physics as relativity, electromagnetism and quantum mechanics is what gives 1/137 its allure.
PAUL RATNER, “WHY THE NUMBER 137 IS ONE OF THE GREATEST MYSTERIES IN PHYSICS” AT BIG THINK (OCTOBER 31, 2018)
First Question to the Devil
Nobelist Wolfgang Pauli (1945) is said to have remarked, “When I die, my first question to the devil will be: What is the meaning of the fine structure constant?” At any rate, he thought about it a great deal during his life.
University of Nottingham physics professor Laurence Eaves thinks the number 1/137 would be good for starting communication with intelligent aliens as they would be likely to know about it and to realize they were dealing with other intelligent entities.
- Here’s another thought-provoking number. Consider the irrational number known as phi (ϕ) or the Golden Ratio. Jordan Ellenberg author of Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else (2021):
Among the mysteries of the irrationals, one number holds a special place: the so-called golden ratio. The golden ratio’s value is about 1.618 (but not exactly 1.618, since then it would be the ratio 1,618/1,000, and therefore not irrational) and it’s also referred to by the Greek letter φ, which is pronounced “fee” if you’re a mathematician and “fie” if you are in a fraternity. If you want an exact description, the golden ratio can be expressed as (1/2)(1+√5.)
JORDAN ELLENBERG, “THE MOST IRRATIONAL NUMBER” AT SLATE (JUNE 8, 2021)
The “Divine Proportion”
We find this number everywhere too:
The golden ratio is sometimes called the “divine proportion,” because of its frequency in the natural world. The number of petals on a flower, for instance, will often be a Fibonacci number. The seeds of sunflowers and pine cones twist in opposing spirals of Fibonacci numbers. Even the sides of an unpeeled banana will usually be a Fibonacci number — and the number of ridges on a peeled banana will usually be a larger Fibonacci number.
RESOURCE LIBRARY, “THE GOLDEN RATIO” AT NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
- Then there is pi (π), which (outside of Carl Sagan’s novel and film) burbles on forever without forming a pattern, yet it is fundamental in nature too.
Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
A brain than can know/A world that can be known and the design debate.
How Does the Intelligibility of Nature Point to Design?
Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from the newly released book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) famously remarked that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility…[t]he fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” Similarly, the mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner (1902–1995) opined that “[t]he miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”
As these remarks highlight, the intelligibility of the universe to the human mind requires explanation in two respects. The first is ontological: Why is nature ordered in such a way that it can be understood? The second is epistemological: Why is the human mind able to gain understanding of the natural order? In the past, these questions did not provoke the puzzlement they do today. Let’s get some historical perspective on the rise of modern science and the current milieu before we examine why a metaphysically naturalistic worldview provides no good answers to these questions, and why theism, which understands the universe as the product of intelligent design, is the only metaphysical context in which the existence and intelligibility of nature has an explanation.
Historical Perspective
For science to be possible, there must be order present in nature, and it has to be discoverable by the human mind. But why should either of these conditions be met? Historically, while there were temporary manifestations of systematic research into nature in ancient Greece and early Islam, and isolated discoveries elsewhere, the seeds of modern science first came to concentrated and sustained fruition in Western culture before its methodologies and achievements were disseminated throughout the world.
This lasting and world-changing development emerged in the context of the Judeo-Christian worldview that permeated medieval Europe. What drove it was a deeply entrenched society-wide conception of the universe as the free and rational creation of God’s mind so that human beings, as rational creatures made in God’s image, were capable of searching out and understanding a divinely ordered reality. The freedom of God’s creative will meant that this order could not be abstractly deduced ― it had to be discovered through observation and experiment ― but God’s stable and faithful character guaranteed it had a rational structure that diligent study could reveal. This theological foundation gave solid answers to ontological and epistemological questions concerning the intelligibility of the universe, but as the quotes from Einstein and Wigner make clear, this foundation had been lost by the middle of the 20th century. Why?
Efficient and Material Causes
Some see it as the outworking of the 17th-century mechanical philosophy that sought to explain all natural phenomena in terms of material contact mechanisms. On this view, mechanical philosophy conceptually reduced scientific causality to efficient and material causes, purging Aristotelian notions of formal and final causality from science. This is perhaps plausible methodologically, but not metaphysically. The conception of mechanism in the mechanical philosophy retained formal causes in their design and final causes in the purpose they were created to serve. The break with Aristotle arose from the fact that, in the conception of the theistic and deistic mechanical philosophers, design and purpose were transcendently imposed rather than immanently active, so the search for scientific explanations turned to the intelligent implementation of efficient material mechanisms. The purge of any sense of design and purpose from the “scientific” conception of nature is due to the late-19th-century rise of Darwinian philosophy, which sees the mechanisms of nature as brute facts and the course of their development as completely blind and purposeless.
Under the Aegis of Naturalism
It is Darwinism, so conceived, that renders the existence of mathematically describable regularities in nature and their intelligibility to the human mind (itself conceived as the accidental result of blind processes) as such a surprise, for it assumes naturalism ― the self-contained character of nature and the denial of supernaturalism ― as the context for science. Under the aegis of naturalism, there can be no expectation that nature is regular in a way that allows presently operative causes to be projected into the past to explain the current state of the universe or into the future to predict its development. The absence of any sufficient cause to explain why nature exists leaves the philosophical naturalist with no reason to think that what does exist should be ordered, or that any order he finds should be projectable into the past or the future.
By denying transcendence and defaulting to a conception of the universe as a closed and ultimately arbitrary system of causes and effects, naturalism makes science the uncanny enterprise on which Einstein and Wigner remarked. On the other hand, the Judeo-Christian worldview recognizes that nature exists and is regular not because it is closed to divine activity, but because (and only because) divine causality is operative. It is only because nature is a creation and thus not a closed system of causes and effects that it exists in the first place and exhibits the regular order that makes science possible. God’s existence and action is not an obstacle to science; it’s what makes it possible.
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