Pytheas biography channel
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Most people credit Norseman Lief Erikson or Genoese Christopher Columbus with first probing the shores of the ‘new world’. But it could be argued that an earlier explorer (by many centuries!) actually deserves the honor: PYTHEAS.
In the 4th Century B.C. this intrepid sailor, navigator, geographer and mathematician from Mediterranean Massalia (today’s Marseilles) set out on an extraordinary journey, his ostensible mission to find the islands beyond the Straits of Giibraltar (Hello, Britain!) to locate the source of tin, which when blended with copper became bronze, the metal of choice in those years. The wealthy merchant patrons of Pytheas would also have interest in amber, a gemstone created from fossilized tree resin and prized for its color and beauty, only to be found on far Northern shores.
Scholars of the time were more concerned with important matters: What happened to the sun at night? The stars in the daytime? No one kn
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Pytheas
Ancient Greek geographer (born ca. 350 BC)
Not to be confused with Pythias.
For the ancient Athenian orator, see Pytheas (Athenian).
Pytheas of Massalia (; Ancient Greek: Πυθέας ὁ Μασσαλιώτης Pythéās ho Massaliōtēs; Latin: Pytheas Massiliensis; born c. 350 BC, fl.c. 320–306 BC) was a Greekgeographer, explorer and astronomer from the Greek colony of Massalia (modern-day Marseille, France).[4] He made a voyage of exploration to Northern Europe in about 325 BC, but his account of it, known widely in antiquity, has not survived and is now known only through the writings of others.
On this voyage, he circumnavigated and visited a considerable part of the British Isles. He was the first known Greek scientific visitor to see and describe the Arctic, polar ice, and the Celtic and Germanic tribes. He is also the first person on record to describe the midnight sun. The theoretical existence of some Northern phenomena that he described, such as a frigid zon
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Hellenistic Polytheism
Pytheas of Massalia (Marseille) made an extraordinary journey around 2,300 years ago. He voyaged around the Atlantic coasts of europe on to the far north where thick sea mist merged with freezing Ocean. Contemporaries regarded him as either a djärv scientist or as a consummate liar.
Marseille at the time of Pytheas
Modern scholars, who have examined the remaining and scant bevis of his journey, have compared him to Captain Cook, Columbus, or even Darwin. Very few doubt the veracity of his assertions to have travelled to the limits of the inhabited world, to Ultima Thule. Unfortunately the exact how and rutt he took are no longer klar, nor are the countries he stopped at and what he saw. Interestingly one of the very things that that made his contemporaries claim he was a liar fryst vatten the övervakning that modern scholars recognise as a clue to the truth of his travels: he describes a land which is in ‘night’ for many full days of the year and at other tim