Avebury Circle, photographed in 2001
Dear.....,
Hi. I became aware of your short book [.......................] relatively recently. I wish I’d known it earlier.
I have a strong interest in the idea and function of the concept of limit in antiquity. My main object of study at UCL was ancient Assyria (mostly the text corpus). Like the Greeks, they had a strong interest in the idea of limit, which is illustrated on the walls of their buildings, and is also represented in their images of the sacred tree. Limit also serves an important function in setting up their gods in heaven (I’ve written about both Assyrian and Babylonian rituals for this).
This tells us something of the actual basis of Mesopotamian religion, which has an origin which is quite different from what we imagine.
Essentially ancient religions are transcendentalist in nature. In other words, they have their origins in a focus on abstract conceptions (limit, infinity, infinite series,completion, totality, etc). Which makes a nonsense of the idea that the Greeks were the first to grapple with sophisticated abstract thought. Clement of Alexandria created a list of civilizations which practised philosophy, and added the Greeks as the* last* to adopt the practice of philosophy.
Since you might be interested in the wider scope of ancient mathematics, I am writing to you to point you at a couple of articles which illustrate that these concerns were a feature of building projects in Neolithic Britain also. The Horus numbers are there, as the basis of establishing Euler’s number via a geometric construction. Euler’s number being the final result of a convergent infinite series.
Did they get their mathematics from Egypt, or did they develop them themselves? I have no idea. Why Euler’s number? It’s a mathematical stand-in for the extreme limit, which is infinity.
‘At Reality’s Edge’
https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2020/12/at-realitys-edge.html?spref=tw%20%20# (Short article)
‘The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard’
http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-mathematical-origins-of-megalithic.html (Long article)
Best regards,
Thomas Yaeger
No comments:
Post a Comment