Featured Episode - The Antikythera Mechanism, Ancient Pompeii and More
Featured Episode - The Antikythera Mechanism, Ancient Pompeii and More
Issue 44
In This Episode
In this episode, host, Petros Koutoupis, speaks about the latest installment of the Indiana Jones franchise, the Antikythera Mechanism, Archimedes, the life and death of ancient Pompeii, he answers listener questions and more.
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Glossary
Akrotiri - The archaeological site and location of an ancient Minoan settlement located on the island of Thera.
Anatolia - The region that is Turkey today.
Antikythera Mechanism - Described as the world’s oldest analogue computer, the ancient Greek mechanical device was used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses.
Archimedes - (c. 287 – c. 212 BCE) From Syracuse in the island of Sicily, he was an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer and inventor.
BCE - Before the Common Era, the equivalent of B.C.
Gaston Maspero - (June 23, 1846 – June 30, 1916) A French Egyptologist.
Herculaneum - An ancient Roman town located in the Campania region of Italy. It was buried under volcanic ash and pumice during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
Knossos - An ancient Minoan site and palace center located on the island of Crete. It is believed that their control of the Aegean was centralized from this location.
Linear A - The written language of the ancient Minoan civilization. It is made up of hundreds of signs that represent syllabic, ideographic and semantic values.
Linear B - An adaptation from the Minoan Linear A, it is made up of hundreds of signs that represent syllabic, ideographic and semantic values that represent an ancient dialect of the Greek language.
Luwian - A group of Anatolian peoples that lived in the central, western and southern regions of Anatolia during the Bronze and Iron ages.
Magna Graecia - Translating to “Greater Greece”, Magna Graecia was the name given to the southern Greek colonies on the Italian boot.
Minoan - An ancient civilization that inhabited (and dominated) the Aegean during the Bronze Age and just before the Mycenaean Greeks. Early archaeological evidence identifies the civilization as early as 3500 BCE.
Mycenaean - A phase or period of the Bronze Age Greece, spanning from approximately 1600-1100 BCE.
Pompeii - An ancient Roman town located in the Campania region of Italy. It was buried under volcanic ash and pumice during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
Sea Peoples - A confederation of seafarers that migrated East toward Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt during the end of the Late Bronze Age, some of which pillaged and plundered whole cities along the way.
Spyridon Marinatos - (November 4, 1901 – October 1, 1974) The Greek archaeologist best known for discovering the site of Akrotiri on the island of Thera.
Syracuse - Home of the infamous Archimedes, it is a coastal city located to the far East of the island of Sicily.
Thera - The southern most island of the Cyclades located in the Aegean Sea.
Vesuvius - Also known as Mount Vesuvius. A volcano located in the Campania region of Italy. It is best known for the eruption that buried both the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum at 79 CE.
Recommended Books
Life in Ancient Rome
By Joan Alcock
This introductory survey of daily life in Ancient Rome focuses in the main on the Late Republic and earlier Empire, and is packed with photographs of the extant remains taken in the main in Italy. The whistlestop tour takes in everything you would expect to find - administration, transport, technology, agriculture, trade and the economy, housing, social stratification, the life-cycle, religion, food and diet and the games.
