Pathways into the Study of Ancient Sciences: Selected Essays.

• Author: Minkowski, Christopher
• Position: Book review

Pathways into the Study of Ancient Sciences: Selected Essays. By DAVID PINGREE. Edited by ISABELLE PINGREE and JOHN M. STEELE. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 104. pt. 3. Philadelphia: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY PRESS, 2014. Pp. xxii + 503

Pathways into the Study of Ancient Sciences is a commemorative anthology of essays by David Pingree, the renowned historian of science, who died in 2005. The studies collected in this volume have been chosen in order to introduce students to a discipline that requires many recondite forms of expertise and knowledge. Pingree's capacious definition of science, reproduced in the editors' preface--"a systematic explanation of perceived or imaginary phenomena, or ... based on such an explanation"--includes divination and astrology, topics on which Pingree published a considerable amount. This collection foregrounds his contributions to the history of astronomy.

It would be difficult in a single volume to represent the full range of Pingree's contribution faithfully (and just as difficult to review such a volume). Nevertheless Pathways succeeds in capturing two primary features of Pingree's historical vision: its broad geographical and temporal scope and its focus on transmission between cultures. The organization of the volume is intended to demonstrate both. It is arranged into six sections: General Studies (4 essays). Mesopotamia (3), The Classical World (4), India (12), Islam (5), and Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance Europe (6). The selection thus ranges temporally from the second millennium BCE to the early modern era, and geographically from Europe across the Middle East to South Asia. The anthology allows additional space for its last three sections, and highlights Pingree's work on Indian sciences, where he devoted rather more of his energies.

As for Pingree's vision of a Eurasian continentwide circulation of scientific ideas. Pathways foregrounds moments when particular techniques and numerical values that were developed in one scientific tradition and that are distinct and recognizable in their specificity--parameters and methods of calculation, for example--were transmitted to another. The support for the argument that a transmission took place is primarily textual. It is based, whenever possible, on surviving translations or adaptations of known and dateable texts. In the ideal case, the texts that served both as the source and as the result survive; more often only...