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Micah Hanks Tries to Write About Ancient Mirrors and Lenses, Botches Job

10/25/2017

20 Comments

 
​Yesterday our old friend Micah Hanks published an article at Ancient Origins in which he attempted to discuss whether ancient people made use of telescopes. He did so without citing any ancient sources to support his claims, nor did he manage to make a strong case for telescopic technology in the ancient world. Instead, he recycled bad sources without understanding their origin and led readers astray.
​It is not terribly controversial to assert that ancient people in the Mediterranean and the Near East made use of lenses for magnifying and even setting things on fire. This is rather well documented in the ancient literature, not to mention through discoveries such as the Archaic Greek lenses with a magnification of up to 7X found on Crete in the 1980s. Dozens of older Bronze Age lenses were found and displayed at the archaeological museum in Heraklion. Consequently, the concept of magnifying lenses was not unknown from the Bronze Age onward. It is more controversial to trace this any further back in time. The so-called Nimrud Lens might be a similar object from 3,000 years ago, but many doubt it was meant as a lens instead of a decorative object. These lenses were made from quartz crystals and were shaped by carving the rock.
 
It is unsurprising that Hanks is not aware of any of the actual lenses known to exist and therefore opens his piece by speculating about whether the ancients manufactured lenses by making their own glass. He does not demonstrate that glass was used to make lenses, but instead he assumes that glass was used to manufacture them in the Bronze Age or deep Antiquity as well, even though glass became mirror material only when methods were discovered to coat the surface of glass with a reflective metal. Lead and gold were the first used, but silver was considered the best. Pliny the Elder (Natural History 33.45) claimed that the technique dated only to the first century CE, though Plautus’ Mostellaria (Act 1, scene 3) mentions presumably glass mirrors 250 years earlier. At any rate, they can’t be traced back much earlier, according to historians, and therefore not to ancient Greece or the Bronze Age.
 
The glass mirrors of Greco-Roman times were not flat like today’s but rather were convex or concave because they had to be blown as bubbles of glass before being coated with metal. Pliny reported that concave mirrors could be used to enlarge the objects reflected in them “to an immense extent.”
 
Hanks is unfamiliar with the ancient testimony, so he offers this howler instead: “Pliny the Elder also wrote of Roman Emperor Nero employing some variety of magnifying device, which he used to observe the Colosseum games from a distance.” That would be a neat trick since the Colosseum wasn’t built until decades after Nero’s death. Hanks is incorrectly reporting Pliny’s remarks in Natural History 37.16 (= Isidore of Seville 16.7.1): “When the surface of the smaragdus is flat, it reflects the image of objects in the same manner as a mirror. The Emperor Nero used to view the combats of the gladiators upon a smaragdus.” The word smaragdus was a general term for green stones, including emeralds, and the unclear passage in Pliny has been interpreted to mean that Nero either used the green stone like sunglasses to see the action with less solar glare, or so he could see the action in his hand since he may have been nearsighted and unable to see the arena from a distance. Either way, there is no indication that the image was magnified, though in a concave mirror it is not impossible. Pliny merely stated that the green stones made soothing and pleasing images that rested the eyes. Hanks, in declining to review the original sources, transforms sunglasses into a telescope without quite knowing why or how.
 
But the most important piece of “evidence” in Hanks’s article is the mirror used in the Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria. I could write an entire article solely on the history of fanciful legends of this mirror, but I need not do so to demonstrate that Hanks has thought but little about it. Indeed, he does not discuss it himself but rather quotes a book from the early 1800s about it! “This mirror is stated by ancient authors to have represented accurately every thing which was transacted throughout all Egypt, both on water and on land.” I regret to report that, to the best of my knowledge, this is actually a medieval Arab-Islamic legend, possibly derived from the fact that the concave mirror that reflected the flame atop the lighthouse reflected enough of the world around it to make visible the surroundings for miles, or else from the genuine ancient claim that the mirror reflected enough light to be seen over vast distances. Indeed, Hanks’s source cites Abulfeda, a fourteenth century Kurdish historian, as his source. This story was prevalent in Arabic literature, and it inspired the even more fabulous legend of Surid’s antediluvian mirror: “He built a mirror of a compound substance in which he saw the climates of the world with their inhabited parts and deserted parts and everything that happened in them. This mirror was placed in a copper lighthouse in the middle of the city of Amsūs” (Akhbar al-zaman 2.2, my trans.). Here “climates” referred to the different regions of the Earth by latitude. Arab-Islamic myth had many more such ancient magic mirrors in the legendary cities of imaginary Egypt, inspired by the Pharos.
 
It is possible that there is an ancient reference to a story like this that I am unaware of, but I can find no author who refers to or cites one specifically, and I could find none.
 
Just to show Hanks’s lack of care: He cites his source to an 1860 book on inventions by John Timbs, but it plagiarized much of its text through uncomfortably close paraphrase. The most likely source is the 1823 Percy Anecdotes, which contains much of the exact wording. This, in turn, is a close cousin of a still earlier essay on the “instruments of the antients” in the Philosophical Magazine in 1803, which the 1860 text cites obliquely via a follow-up article that r an in the same magazine two years later. Both versions are quoted from a French author, Father Abat, in his 1763 Amusmens Philosophiques, which cites only “several authors,” and that text is, according to the sources, in turn inspired by the work of the German philosopher Christian August Crusius! And behind all of that is the origin point: Athanasius Kircher’s 1646 book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (10.1.1), which wasn’t citing ancient authors but Muslim ones, though to be fair, he didn’t make that clear, merely citing “historians,” by which he usually meant the Arab history writers of the Middle Ages. Of interest is the fact that the Percy author, Thomas Byerley misunderstood reference to “several authors” as being “ancient” authors, when they were in fact medieval. The story appears in Benjamin of Tudela and a few other medieval Western writers, but according to Eileen Adair Reeves it originates in Arab myth, probably in the ninth or tenth centuries. There is a similar confusion arising from the works of Thomas Maurice, who in the late 1700s asserted that Strabo had described a mirror for reflecting the sun atop the temple at Heliopolis, something I can’t find in his Geography. Later authors copied Maurice and misunderstood him, turning the story into “Strabo’s” testimony of the magical mirror atop the Pharos.
 
You will forgive me then for laughing at Hanks for not taking the few minutes to look this material up before opining from a medieval myth that “… the notion that such ‘high technology’ might have been implemented in some parts of the ancient world, at least on a small scale, really isn’t that farfetched.”
20 Comments
Joe Scales
10/25/2017 10:37:33 am

Hanks is on the wrong track here. Everyone knows of course, that the answers lie with the Templars, who must have had access to such secret technology. Otherwise they couldn't have used telescopes to view Venus in its crescent phase and then carve it on a rock in Nova Scotia...

Reply
Americanegro
10/25/2017 12:53:12 pm

It has reliably been established (Wolter, 2017) that the Templars acquired telescope technology on their voyages to Arabia and Asia. Related technology was used by their Grandmaster Leonardo da Vinci to create the second Shroud of Turin. It can only be assumed that the Venus Families had guardianship of the technology for hundreds of years before. The Oculists of the 18th century were a Templar offshoot, and Benjamin Franklin a high-ranking Freemason of course invented bifocals as well as an electrical engine sufficiently powerful to serve as a chicken rotisserie.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
10/25/2017 01:17:28 pm

...Of course they later realized they could see Venus in its crescent stage without a telescope, and so they decided it was a superfluous technology and threw it out, which is why it doesn't show up in the history books until the seventeenth century. Well, that, and the Smithsonian doesn't want you to know about secret Arabian telescopes.

Reply
Joe Scales
10/26/2017 05:39:14 pm

And in this respect, Wolter truly followed in the footprints of the greats.

Jim
10/25/2017 04:04:38 pm

Exactly right !,,,,Hundreds, if not thousands of years before the Tempars existed they were viewing the heavens from Tibetan observatories high in the Himalayas, which made telescopes redundant. It was most likely at this time that they spotted Nova Scotia and the Americas from up there as well. And the rest, as they say, is history !

Reply
Only Me
10/25/2017 12:39:35 pm

Hanks isn't completely silly. Last week you bemoaned the increased belief in Atlantis, now Hanks is writing an article about telescopes in ancient times? Methinks ol' Hanky is aware of that survey and trying to tap into that demographic.

Or, I'm mistaken and Hanks really is that silly.

Reply
Bob Jase
10/25/2017 12:45:54 pm

Silver is absolutely the best backing material for glass mirrors because you can shatter the mirror, load the shards into a shotgut and then blast away at attacking werewolves.

I do sometimes wonder if the legend of Archimedes using mirrors to defend Syracuse against invasion isn't founded on an attempt to do so. He would have known the principle behind it and even an unsuccessful try might have been rewritten as successful centuries later.

Clearly Pliny should have written of his adventures in the Emerald City, green eyeglasses being standard there.

Reply
Ralf Buelow
10/25/2017 02:23:17 pm

Lucian of Samosata mentions a reflecting telescope on the moon in his "True Story" (2nd century AD). So he might have seen something somewhere.

Reply
Giorgio Tsoukalos
10/25/2017 04:53:01 pm

Jason you are sniffling little worm. Delete criticism's you little twerp. Any day anytime I will take you on! And I will destroy you with fact.
Fact Ancient Aliens existed and still exist!

Reply
David Bradbury
10/25/2017 05:18:19 pm

" I will destroy you with fact."
Ummmmmm- no.

Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
10/25/2017 08:15:07 pm

So. What we know about you. You're posting from a phone (short posts, misused words that are actually words), you're poorly educated (your sentences are borderline nonsense in this thread), and you're not actually G-Sookie (you don't match his Twitter "fist").

Reply
The Real Ancient Alien
10/25/2017 08:30:36 pm

I sense the makings of a bosom-off! Who's with me?

Reply
BigNick
10/25/2017 08:59:50 pm

If Fake Giorgio and Fake Jason were in a fight, who would win?

Reply
Jason Colavito
10/25/2017 11:33:36 pm

I would win.

Jim
10/26/2017 12:19:25 am

If hair pulling is allowed, my money is on Jason

Shane Sullivan
10/26/2017 01:52:59 am

Fake Rickson by armbar.

Josh Gates
10/26/2017 02:57:43 am

Jason you are a sad little man!

Jason Colavito link
10/26/2017 06:20:26 am

I didn't write the comment above. It's another from the same faker.

E.P. Grondine
10/26/2017 09:54:03 am

It looks like this author is unfamiliar with Rober Temple's book on ancient lenses.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
10/26/2017 09:56:17 am

I know of it, though I doubt Hanks is, but I wouldn't call it an improvement to use Robert Temple as a source.

Reply

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