The Discoverers (Knowledge Series Book 2)

by Daniel J. Boorstin

It is hard for us to imagine how insular and fragmentary was the past before scholars around the world established worldwide lines of contemporaneity. Orthodox Christians, spotlighting the events of the Bible, left all the rest of the world in outer darkness. To bring together the events of the Jews, Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans into a single chronology required superhuman erudition and a willingness to ask embarrassing questions. One of the first to try was the same ambitious cartographer, Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594), who found a way to depict the spherical earth on a flat surface for the convenience of worldfarers on the sea. He also saw the need for a universal chronology to give people their bearings as they explored all past time. In 450 folio pages he produced an ingenious Chronology … from the beginning of the world up to the year 1568, done from eclipses and astronomical observations. Events among the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans were synchronized by the contemporary references to solar and lunar eclipses. This was only the first part of Mercator’s grand unfulfilled plan to depict the whole world since the Creation in both spatial and temporal dimensions.