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Dinesh club

Posted: 05 Jul 2020

Taken: 05 Jul 2020

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The Discovery of Middle Earth •
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Pytheas travel

Pytheas travel
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
It was almost three centuries before the Roman conquest of Gaul that one of the greatest expeditions in the ancient world took place, and over a thousand years would pass before anything similar was attempted. One day in the mid-320s, an ocean-going vessel rounded the rocky headland, passed under the beacon-tower and the temple of Artemis, and came to rest among the other ships in what is now the Vieux Port of Marseille. Massalia, founded three hundred years before, had become one of the most powerful cities in the Mediterranean. Aristotle had recently praised its enlightened oligarchy and its council of six hundred senators. Its houses stretched over the hills behind the port, where vines and olive trees had been planted. Ramparts kept out the Ligurian tribes who lurked in the forested ravines of the hinterland, but there were safe and well traveled routes up the Rhone Valley leading to the lands of the wealthy, wine addicted Celtic tribes…….

The traveller’s name is Pytheas. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas He may have been commissioned by the senate or by a guild of merchants to prospect new trading routes, or perhaps as a boy growing up in Massalia, he had contracted the incurable disease of curiosity. He would have read the sixth-century ‘Periplus’ that described the coasts from Massalia to the Sacred Promontory, ‘where the starry light declines’, and the sea routes that led to the wintry lands under the Great Bear from where the tin and amber came. Mediterranean city-states stated their explorers as secret agents and kept their logbooks under lock and key, that leaks were unavoidable, especially in a large port, and mariners are notoriously loquacious. Pytheas would certainly have heard of his fellow Massaliot, Euthymenes, who, in the early 500s had sailed through the Pillars of Hercules, turned south and followed the coast for many weeks until he saw crocodiles and hippopotami swimming in the fresh water of a great river that flowed far out to sea. Down the harbour, he would have talked to sailors who knew how to steer a steady course over long distances and whose knowledge of winds, constellations, tides and currents was only then being translated into mathematical equations.

Pytheas was conversant with the very latest developments in scientific theory. He may even have corresponded with Aristotle. He knew that the celestial pole around which all the stars revolved were an empty patch of sky and could be located from three stars in the constellations of the Little Bear and the Dragon. Before leaving home, he set up a gnomon marked off into one hundred and twenty sections -- a system which, in contradiction of the accepted chronology, suggests knowledge of the Babylonian division of a circle into 360…..

He sailed through the Pillars of Hercules -- or if the Carthaginian blockade was in force , took the overland route along the rivers of Aquitanian Gaul -- to Atlantic coast.

. . . .Pytheas sailed along the busy coast among the coracles and canoes and larger vessels from the Atlantic lanes, to the headland at the other end of southern Britain: Kantion (Kent). According to one source, he then walked all the way through Britain. The native lived in houses made of reed or logs, and threshed their wheat indoors because of the rainy climate. They made a beverage from honey and grain, which they drank with a dismal potage of miller, roots and herbs, having very little meat or fruit.

As he went, Pytheas calculated his latitude from the elevation of the mid-winter sun. in one place, he rose four peches (about eight degrees) above the horizon, which implies a latitude between the Peak District and the Yorkshire Dales. The next reading showed a solar elevation of only three peches (somewhere near the Moray Firth in Sutherland). Here, in the middle of a fourth-century BC winter, the history of Britain begins -- not with Caesar’s summer raiding parties three hundred years later, but with the first indentifiable visitor, a scientific traveller with a name, a place of birth and geographical coordinates, muddying his Mediterranean shoes on the soil of an island whose very existence was in doubt.,

He reached the northernmost part of Prettanike at a place called Orka -- possibly Duncanby Head, which looks over to the Orkneys. He had now gone for byond even the imaginings of Homer. He set sail again, perhaps in a native boat. Six days out from Orka was an island called Thoule (the Faroes or feeland), and a place where the sun kept watch all night in summer, barely rising from its bed. Further still, he came to a region that was neither land nor sea but a mixture of all the elements ‘on which one can neither walk nor sail’. In the fog banks and pack ice of the Arctic, he saw the earth in its troubled infancy or its confused old age.

He returned through the amber-rich Baltic and probably followed the river Dnieper to the Black Sea. In effect Pytheas circumnavigated Europe…… Page 91 /92 / 93 (excerpts)
3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.

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