Comments from Jan 31, I think, and the class before

• Luke wants to know more about the "restriction of information" and whether it was on purpose.
• I assume you are talking about the situation that "books" and other "publications" were not easily available: there were people called "booksellers," but books cost money, and I bet it was more significant in amount than today, when paper is cheap, and it's easy to print off a run of 10,000 copies.
  
• No one purposefully designed the restriction.
• It was simply the case that one might know about a book, but simply not be able to get one's hands on it. Friends and one's money situation were determiners.
• Also, the alphabet made reading available to many more people than, say, hieroglyphic writing or syllabic writing did, but still, reading and writing are advanced skills.
  
• Jenny wants to know about Minoan Crete and geography.
• We have writings from the Minoans, in a syllabic script called Linear B, and it is Greek, but they date from before 1200 BCE and are not about geography at all. Mostly, they wrote down economic information, how many cows or amphorae of oil or wine went where to whom from whom, etc. Nothing really like prose, no real geographic writing. We can map their known habitation sites, etc., but not their theory or knowledge.
• jenny also wants to know whether there was a period of friendly Greek-Persian relations before the Persian War.
• Not that I know of: when the Persians took over the Lydian Empire, they acquired sway over many Ionian Greek cities of Asia Minor, and since they were an expansionist empire, the Greeks became simply the next people to conquer: that's my simplistic understanding of Persian-Greek interactions of that time.
  
• John wants to know about failed colonization efforts, like in more recent times in Roanoke or Jamestown.
• Great question. I don't have anything to offer, but I know I've heard mention of failed attempts. I just don't remember where or anything detailed about it. If you find something, report back, please.
• Friend asks about contacts with Scandinavia in Archaic or Classical times.
• So far, we've heard very little that is reliably identified as Scandinavia. The stuff about the Tin Islands (Cassiterides) might be that far north, and we've read that the Greeks heard of peoples called Hyperboreans who lived in the far north where the sun didn't set. So they had rumors and hearsay, but little real knowledge.
• When we read about Pytheas the Massaliot, we'll hear a lot more about Scandinavia: he may well have gone there.
• Matthew wants to know about Atlantis: was it really believed? where was it?
• Read Plato's Timaeus for the best text about that: it occurs early on and is just a small part of the Timaeus. I don't believe it figured in at all in stories earlier than Plato (many people think Plato made it up): it seems to have been a fiction that was picked up on and taken literally later. It could go back to Phoenician reports of a land far to the west beyond the Pillars of Hercules. All Plato says is that it is beyond the Pillars of Heracles. It's sort of like Star Wars: a long long time ago (9000 years) on an island far far away...
• George speculates that the independent status of Greek colonies helped with the spread of knowledge and culture throughout the Mediterranean.
• Kaleb wonders, given how much the view of the earth has changed over time, how it will change in the future: learning about ancient views puts our modern views into a different perspective.
• Agreed: we come to see the provisional status of "science" and "scientific knowledge": science is not certain and true: science is the best hypothesis that has not yet failed, and it is eager to find the way the hypothesis fails and to replace it with a new one.
• Luke wonders if writing and such will become obsolete and seen as a cumbersome way to interface with people: computers might interface differently with our brains. Will knowing things become obsolete? Will computers do all our thinking for us?
• Perhaps. I'm not convinced: computers so far don't know anything or think at all: they just store things that we can turn into "knowledge" by calling them up. They "think" things we tell them to think.
• Rose wants to know when a spherical world became accepted?
• Eudoxus seems to be the one who pushed it hard and got it through to many, but it certainly was not as widely accepted at any time in the times we study as it is today.
  
• Jenny is impressed by how much the Greeks visited and revered and claimed to learn from Egypt and asks if that was reciprocal.
• I don't know whether the Egyptians ever considered Greece a source of knowledge before they were conquered by Alexander and turned into basically a province of Rome.
  
• The Egyptians had had writing and therefore history and texts for a couple millennia before the Greeks acquired writing and emerged into the "intellectual" world. But the Egyptians don't have any philosophy that I know of, or even any real history (like Herodotus or Thucydides, who tried to explain and analyze and learn lessons, not just record): they had lots and lots of records, myths, and poetry, but not prose that explained the world in non-divine ways that I know of.
• I admit that my knowledge of Egypt is shallow: I'd like to learn more (in all my spare time) and would appreciate being told by someone who knows.
• Kaleb is impressed with Parmenides' creation of zones on a sphere as a model of the earth.
• I am too, but I recommend finding the fragments of Parmenides that that illustration in Roller is based on. It shows just how speculative Parmenides' ideas were: they were based more on imposing symmetry and theory on the world than on data from the empirical world, as is true of much of Greek thinking.
• John wants to know if Parmenides was speculating based on what he heard from Phoenicians.
• I don't think he says that anywhere, or we have really good reason to believe that, but it's perfectly plausible that he's basing his speculation on such things.
  
• How would you test your hypothesis?
• Paige wants to know about discussions of colonization and travel/expeditions other than Oydsseus and the Argo and whether that sort of thing would be a good final project.
• The question is very broad and needs to be refined as we go, but it's a good start for a final project.
• Herodotus is the source of a great deal of our information about colonization: it's also found scattered in later sources.
• friend is fascinated by Korbilon on the French Atlantic coast as well as by the Phoenicians.
• Me too.
  
• Matt wants to know about Greek-Carthaginian relations.
• I would too: I have honestly never really looked into it. Final Project possibility?
• George wants to know about any physical evidence of European presence in the Americas prior to the common era.
• It's all highly speculative, and scholars are honestly extremely speculative. If you find anything that looks reputable, let us all know. It is fascinating.
• There's a good deal of evidence of Viking presence in the North before the colonization era of 1492 and following.