3 - 4 pm (CET)

Dr. Olivier Defaux (EC-Chronoi)

The Table or Canon of Kings, composed by the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (2nd century), presents a list of kings and emperors starting with Babylonian King Nabonassar (747-734 BC). He aimed to provide an efficient tool to his readers to compute Egyptian years before using his set of astronomical tables. This list has been progressively completed after Ptolemy, sometimes until the Fall of Constantinople, by Byzantine scribes and scholars, before being introduced to western Europe. This document aroused much interest among specialists of chronography since the 17th century and assyriologists but less among astronomers and historians of sciences. Moreover, we still do not have any critical edition. This talk will present the challenges of editing Ptolemy's Table of Kings and new insights on its textual history to show how this document travelled from second-century Alexandria to the Byzantine intellectual centres and the Italian Quattrocento, transmitted and modified by generations of antique and medieval scholars.

The recording of this talk will be uploaded soon, please check back for updates.