The collection of papers assembled here on a variety of topics in
ancient and medieval astronomy was originally suggested by Noel Swerdlow
of the University of Chicago. He was also instrumental in making a
selection* which would, in general, be on the same level as my book The
Exact Sciences in Antiquity. It may also provide a general background
for my more technical History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy and for
my edition of Astronomi- cal Cuneiform Texts. Several of these
republished articles were written because I wanted to put to rest
well-entrenched historical myths which could not withstand close
scrutiny of the sources. Examples are the supposed astronomical origin
of the Egyptian calendar (see [9]), the discovery of precession by the
Babylonians [16], and the "simplification" of the Ptolemaic system in
Copernicus' De Revolutionibus [40]. In all of my work I have striven
to present as accurately as I could what the original sources reveal
(which is often very different from the received view). Thus, in [32]
discussion of the technical terminology illuminates the meaning of an
ancient passage which has been frequently misused to support modern
theories about ancient heliocentrism; in [33] an almost isolated
instance reveals how Greek world-maps really looked; and in [43] the
Alexandrian Easter computus, held in awe by many historians, is shown
from Ethiopic sources to be based on very simple procedures.
