Botany
Years: 6669BCE - Now
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Food crops such as wheat and maize become standardized in this age.
The domestication of maize is of particular interest to researchers—archaeologists, geneticists, ethnobotanists, geographers, etc.
The process is thought by some to have started twelve thousand to seven thousand five hundred years ago.
Research from the 1950s to 1970s originally focused on the hypothesis that maize domestication occurred in the highlands between Oaxaca and Jalisco, because the oldest archaeological remains of maize known at the time were found there.
Genetic studies led by John Doebley identified Zea mays ssp. parviglumis, native to the Balsas River valley and known as Balsas teosinte, as being the crop wild relative teosinte genetically most similar to modern maize.
However, archaeobotanical studies published in 2009 now point to the lowlands of the Balsas River valley, where stone milling tools with maize residue have been found in an eighty-seven hundred-year-old layer of deposits.
Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor as head of the Lyceum, dies about 286 BCE, leaving behind an influential body of scientific works, particularly those in botany, as well as his contributions to logic, his Doctrines of the Natural Philosophers, and Characters, his satirical study of ethical types.
The interests of Strabo, who succeeds Throphrastus, lie primarily in physical theory, causing the school to lose touch with Aristotle's major works (either through indifference or unavailability).
Gaius Plinius Secundus, called Pliny the Elder, writes the monumental Historia naturalis, the earliest truly encyclopedic work, published in 77 as a series of anthologies concerned with such scientific and technical topics as anthropology, botany, cosmography, metallurgy, psychology, pharmacology, and zoology.
Chrysanthemums were first cultivated in China as a flowering herb as far back as the fifteenth century BCE.
The flower may have been brought to Japan in the eighth century CE, and the Emperor will eventually adopt the flower as his official seal.
The Dream Pool Essays represents the earliest known writing about the magnetic compass, movable type printing, experimentation with the camera obscura only decades after Ibn al-Haytham, and includes many different fields of study in essay and encyclopedic form, including geology, astronomy, botany, zoology, mineralogy, anatomy, pharmacology, geography, optics, economics, military strategy, philosophy, etc.
Published in this year by the polymath scientist and statesman Shen Kuo, the book features some of Shen's most advanced theories, including geomorphology and gradual climate change, while he improves Chinese astronomy by fixing the position of the pole star and correcting the lunar error by plotting its orbital course every night for a continuum of five years.
Shen's book is also the first to describe the drydock in China, and discusses the advantages of the relatively recent invention of the canal pound lock over the old flash lock.
Abu al-Salt has written an encyclopedic work of many treatises on the scientific disciplines known as quadrivium.
This work is probably known in Arabic as Kitāb al‐kāfī fī al‐ʿulūm.
His interests also include alchemy as well as the study of medicinal plants.
He is keen to discover an elixir able to transmute copper into gold and tin into silver.
His writings include Risāla fī al-amal bi‐l‐astrulab ("On the construction and use of the astrolabe"); a description of the three instruments known as the Andalusian equatoria; Ṣifat ʿamal ṣafīḥa jāmiʿa taqawwama bi‐hā jamīʿ al‐kawākib al‐sabʿa ("Description of the construction and Use of a Single Plate with which the totality of the motions of the seven planets"), where the seven planets refer to Mercury, Venus, earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; Kitāb al‐wajīz fī ʿilm al‐hayʾa ("Brief treatise on cosmology"); Ajwiba ʿan masāʾil suʾila ʿan‐ha fa‐ajāba or Ajwiba ʿan masāʾil fī al‐kawn wa‐ʾl‐ḥabīʿa wa‐ʾl‐ḥisāb ("Solution to questions on cosmology, physics, and arithmetic"); an introduction to astronomy; and A Summary of Ptolemy's Almagest.
Abu al-Salt was born in Denia, al-Andalus.After the death of his father while he was a child, he had become a student of al‐Waqqashi (1017–1095) of Toledo (a colleague of Al-Zarqali).
Upon completing his mathematical education in Seville, and because of the continuing conflicts during the reconquista, he had set out with his family to Alexandria and then Cairo in 1096.
In Cairo, he had entered the service of the Fatimid ruler Abū Tamīm Ma'add al-Mustanṣir bi-llāh and the Vizier Al-Afdal Shahanshah.
His service had continued until 1108, when, according to Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, his attempt to retrieve a very large Felucca laden with copper, that had capsized in the Nile River, ended in failure.
Abu al-Salt had built a mechanical tool to retrieve the Felucca, and was close to success when the machine's silk ropes fractured.
The Vizier Al-Afdal had ordered Abu al-Salt's arrest, and he was imprisoned for more than three years, only to be released in 1112.
Abu al-Salthad then left Egypt for Kairouan in Tunisia, where he had entered the service of the Zirids in Ifriqiya.
He also occasionally travels to Palermo and works in the court of Roger I of Sicily as a visiting physician.
He dies in 1134 in Bejaia, in present Algeria.
Ramon Llull was born into a wealthy family in Palma, the capital of the new Kingdom of Majorca founded by James I of Aragon to integrate politically the recently conquered territories of the Balearic Islands (today part of Spain) in the Crown of Aragon.
His parents had come from Catalonia as part of the colonizing efforts for the formerly Almohad island.
As the island had been conquered militarily, all the Muslim population who had not been able to flee the conquering Europeans had been enslaved, though they still constitute a significant portion of the island's population.
Conversant in Latin, Catalan, Occitan (both considered the same language at the time as "popular Latin") and Arabic, Llull had been well educated, and had become the tutor of James II of Aragon.
By 1257, he had married Blanca Picany and they have had two children, Domènec and Magdalena; yet despite his family he lives, as before, a troubadour's life.
About this time he had become the Seneschal (the administrative head of the royal household) to the future King James II of Majorca, a relative of his wife.
A key event in his early life was his religious conversion.
In 1265, he had had a religious epiphany, a vision of Christ crucified.
The vision came to him five times in all.
As a consequence of this conversion experience, he took the habit of the Third Order of St. Francis the following year, leaving his position and family to live a life of solitude and study for the next nine years.
During this time, he had learned Arabic from an enslaved Muslim he had purchased.
His first major work, Art Abreujada d'Atrobar Veritat (The Abbreviated Art of Finding Truth) had been written in Catalan and then translated into Latin.
He has written treatises on alchemy and botany, Ars Magna, and Llibre de meravelles.
He has written the romantic novel Blanquerna, the first major work of literature written in Catalan, and perhaps the first European novel.
Llull presses for the study of Arabic and other then-insufficiently studied languages in Spain for the purpose of converting Muslims to Christianity.
He has even written some books in Arabic.
His interest in finding a common ground between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism makes him one of the earliest ecumenists.
However, his mission to convert the Jews of Europe is zealous, his goal to utterly relieve Christendom of any Jews or Jewish religious influence.
Some scholars regard Llull's as the first comprehensive articulation, in the Christian West, of an expulsionist policy regarding Jews who refused conversion.
To acquire converts, he works for amicable public debate to foster an intellectual appreciation of a rational Christianity among the Jews of his time.
His rabbinic opponents include Rabbi Shlomo ben Aderet of Barcelona and Moshe ben Shlomo of Salerno.
The eminent medical schools of Pisa and Padua establish botanical gardens devoted mainly to medicinal species.
The medical school in Pisa, stimulated by the growing reliance on herbal medicine, establishes in about 1543 a botanical garden devoted mainly to medicinal species.
The garden is used for training medical students, growing plants to make medicines, and conducting research.
The medical school at Padua follows Pisa’s lead by establishing in this year a botanical garden devoted mainly to medicinal species.
"[the character] Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree."
― Michael Crichton, Timeline (November 1999)