ἀνθρώποισι πᾶσι μέτεστι γινώσκειν ἑωυτοὺς καὶ σωφρονεῖν.
Tonsils present organs of the lymphoid apparatus that are strategically placed at the entrance of digestive and respiratory systems. Tonsillectomy as well as direct laryngoscopy were known procedures in ancient Greece since the Hippocratic era. Continue reading “Paul of Aegina’s Innovative Tonsillectomy (7th century AD)”
Modern historians generally hold Isaac II Angelos (1185–95) and his brother Alexios III (1195–1203) in very low esteem on account of the image Niketas Choniates paints of them in his History, and especially in the version written after the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Continue reading “Luxury and Corruption in the Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) State under the Angeloi Emperors”
During the reign of the first six kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which is the period between the end of the 4th century BCE and the middle of the 2nd century BCE, Egyptian cults spread successfully from Egypt, particularly from Alexandria, to ports in the ancient Mediterranean. These cults were formed almost exclusively around the divine couple of Isis and Sarapis. Continue reading “The spread of Egyptian cults across the early Hellenistic Aegean Sea”
Even though the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade in April 1204 marked a turning point in the history of Southeastern Europe and the entire Eastern Mediterranean world, changing—often radically—the political, cultural, religious, economic and social circumstances in this vast region, a wave of changes beginning exactly one century before this significant event had already transformed the political system in Southeastern Europe, that is, in the Byzantine Empire᾽s European hinterland. Continue reading “Creation of a new political elite in the Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) World through a process of political marriages – A high-point of ‘Byzantine’ diplomacy”
Uterine cancer had been known since antiquity. The earliest documentation, even tenuous in the extreme, comes from the ancient Egyptian Kahun papyrus (c. 2000 BC). A small passage from another Egyptian papyrus, the Ebers, written in 1500 BC, that was mentioning: “woman gnawed in her uterus and in the vagina where ulcers develop” led some authors to conclude that the disease described was uterine cancer. Continue reading “The first accurate description of uterine carcinoma by Aretaeus of Cappadocia”
The Apennines, from their junction with the Alps above Marseilles, are inhabited on both slopes, that looking to the Tyrrhenian sea and that turned to the plain, by the Ligurians whose territory reaches on the seaboard-side as far as Pisa, the first city of western Etruria, and on the land side as far as Arretium ( = Arezzo). Next come the Etruscans, and after them both slopes are inhabited by the Umbrians. Continue reading “The Celtic/Gallic invasions of Italy (4th-3rd cen. B.C.)”
Novo Scriptorium 