The Statue That Was Sold for Camel Loads
The Colossus of Rhodes stood for fifty-four years and lay in ruins for nearly nine hundred. A Jewish merchant from Edessa bought the bronze.
Read the story →A century
3rd century BC
5 stories from this century.
The Soldier Who Killed Archimedes
After two years of siege, the Romans broke into Syracuse. A junior soldier found a seventy-five-year-old man drawing in the sand and made the worst mistake of his career.
Read the story →What Archimedes Did Two Thousand Years Before Newton
He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.
Read the story →The Librarian Who Measured the Earth With a Shadow
Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.
Read the story →The Lighthouse That Outlived Its Own Civilization
For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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