Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient China: The 'Zhou Bi Suan Jing' (Needham Research Institute Studies) Review

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(More customer reviews)Don't let the title fool you. This is not just about China, this is about the human condition. Someone with an imagination should have worked on the title and given it a bit more excitement. I almost skipped reading the book because the title seemed so dry.
I read this book twice and will probably read it, again. The author's presentation is simply masterful. Step by step, he recreates the setting and background for the book's creation and utilization. In fact, he walks the reader through about 2000 years of 'uses' that people found for the book. According to Cullen, this classic was probably a gift to a Chinese emperor and then dumped in a back room for 200 years. It was only when political circumstances changed and an 'old' book might be valuable that it was 'rediscovered' and rendered useful.
For anyone interested in the practice of ancient astronomy, Cullen goes into great detail on the tools and practice of Chinese astronomers from about 3000 BC to the arrival of Jesuits in 1600. For anyone interested in Chinese political history, Cullen explores imperial Chinese history in a way that simply makes one want to read much, much more. For anyone interested in ancient Chinese record keeping, Cullen offers practical advice on what to make of the 'documents' we moderns discover.
I hope they make this a paperback so that it can get wider circulation. What is commonly called 'the history of math' is often embarrassingly western (ethno-centric). This book offers a means of correcting that unfortunate state of affairs.

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The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, Revised Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a highly interesting book, collecting together a good assortment of different articles that (more or less) focus on the great Library of Alexandria. The articles are quite varied in approach: one is an imaginative tour of the city verging on the whimsical, another a dry detailed account of archaeological finds. One is an intriguing down-to-earth social history of scholar and student culture of the time, while another is a far-ranging exploration of the mystical beliefs and practices of the Neo-Platonists. This variety keeps the book fresh as one is reading it, and approaching the subject from multiple disciplinary angles in this manner keeps the presentation from becoming simplistic or one-dimensional. All of the articles are learned and scholarly in a good way, written so as to be accessible to the reasonably well-educated non-specialist (like me).
My one nitpick of this book would be that many of the articles seem only tangentially related to the Library of Alexandria itself. In fact, of the ten articles in the book (counting the Intro), only two seem really focused on the actual Library per se: the editor's introduction and article #3 (Barnes' "Cloistered Bookworms"). The others, while interesting in their own right and not utterly irrelevant to the title, seem to veer off more and more, until by the final article we are way off (a fun, nitpicky analysis of Eco's novel " Name of the Rose" in the light of what medieval libraries were really like). It is as if the editor was straining to get enough material to put together a book. Surely there is more to say about the actual library itself?--There's a whole book out there just on the Library's bibliographer, after all ("Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography" by Rudolf Blum).
Still, this is a fine book that I'd recommend to anyone interested in the Library of Alexandria (both in and of itself and phenomena tangential to it); as an utter layperson in this field I enjoyed it a lot, but my guess is that even the Classical expert will find something here worthwhile.
In case you're wondering, here are the articles:
"Introduction: Alexandria in History and Myth" by Roy MacLeod
1. "Before Alexandria: Libraries in the Ancient Near East" by D.T. Potts
2. "Alexandria: The Umbilicus of the Ancient World" by Wendy Brazil
3. "Cloistered Bookworms in the Chicken-Coop of the Muses: The Ancient Library of Alexandria" by Robert Barnes
4. "Aristotle's Works: The Possible Origins of the Alexandria Collection" by R.G. Tanner
5. "Doctors in the Library: The Strange Tale of Apollonius the Bookworm and Other Stories" by John Vallance
6. "The Theatre of Paphos and the Theatre of Alexandria: Some First Thoughts" by J.R. Green
7. "Scholars and Students in the Roman East" by Samuel N.C. Lieu
8. "The Neoplatonists and the Mystery Schools of the Mediterranean" by Patricia Cannon Johnson
9. "Alexandria and its Medieval Legacy: The Book, the Monk and the Rose" by J.O. Ward

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