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“... Egypt. In the Empire’s subsequent dismemberment by his Macedonian generals, one of them, called Ptolemy, established himself as master of Egypt, founding a dynasty which lasted for three centuries until the defeat of Cleopatra (VII) and the Roman annexation of Egypt in 30 BC. The early Ptolemies encouraged a major influx of Greek and Macedonian soldiers and ...”

“... a military leader will be made. His consideration of the sources includes a startling theory about Ptolemy: that along with Alexander’s body, whose funeral car he diverted to Alexandria on its way to Macedon, he received the Royal Journals, which had been despatched in the cortège with Alexander’s other possessions. If this were so, ...”

“... held in the ‘royal treasuries’, going on to tell him of the great collections amassed by Ptolemy Philadelphus and his successors. ‘Amr replied that he could not decide the fate of the books without consulting the Caliph, Omar. The Caliph’s answer, quoted here from Alfred Butler’s Arab Conquest of Egypt (1902), is infamous: ‘Touching the books ...”

“... was equally ready to dismiss Megasthenes’ first-hand descriptions of India on the same basis. Ptolemy of Alexandria (c.90-168 AD), the theoretical chapters of whose Geography we now have in a superlative new translation, was the first systematic cartographer to introduce the mapping of geographical points by precise co-ordination of parallel and ...”

“... Celts from the north and west ravaged the country and led to the death of the monarch (one of Ptolemy’s sons). Antigonus staged an ambush that killed or drove out a large body of the invaders, and hired those who remained to serve as his mercenaries. With these new troops he faced down other claimants to the throne and became, in his early forties, king ...”

“... too well. Clear, factual and plain, his virtues have been read back into his originals, primarily Ptolemy and Aristobulus, as if Arrian alone had been able to see the solid gold in the gilded corpus of Alexander histories which the glittery taste of the Hellenistic age had allowed to be neglected. Not likely. Ptolemy, the ...”

“... it is clear at least that he ‘lived the majority of his adulthood during the reign of the second Ptolemy (282-46), the period when the Ptolemaic empire was at its height’. He was born in Cyrene, a coastal city more than five hundred miles west of the Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria; it was the capital of Cyrenaica, a wealthy independent kingdom ruled until ...”

“... knew that the name in the pharaonic cartouche on the Rosetta Stone in some way stood for Ptolemy (V); the Greek inscription celebrated the boy-king’s accession and offered him special honours in Egyptian temples on the anniversary of his coronation and his birth. The recumbent lion ? was the fourth sign in the hieroglyphic inscription corresponding ...”

“... movements of the heavens (what we would call astronomy). In the middle of the second century CE, Ptolemy did make the distinction, separating prognostication by the stars into two categories. The prediction of the positions and movements of stars and planets was a science with a high degree of certainty, and the subject of ...”

“... will properly lament the fact that Greek scientific prose – Hippocrates, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Galen – is ignored. But Mr Levi does not pretend to be comprehensive, and a reader who wants detailed accounts of Ptolemy’s Syntaxis or Epictetus’s Manual may find them elsewhere. Not, however, in the Cambridge ...”

“... him for building a ‘thirty’ and then a ‘forty’. Pyrgoteles’ predecessors, working for Ptolemy II Philadelphus, had turned out ‘twelves’ and ‘twenties’ in great numbers, creating the largest fleet the Greek world had known. Egypt was safe, more or less, from invasion by land, but this also meant it was not well situated to launch land-based ...”

“... robes and other personal effects Phila had sent him were captured by the enemy and handed over to Ptolemy. She took her own life after Demetrius’ defeat at Beroea in 288, six years before his death. Demetrius was closest, however, to a woman he never married, Lamia, the daughter of Cleanor of Athens. He first encountered her in 306 among the prisoners of ...”

“... however, and if Copemicus’s astronomy relies on devices used by earlier astronomers, such as Ptolemy, how is the acceptance of Copernicus to be explained historically and culturally? Blumenberg argues that the cosmological authority of Aristotle had in fact been weakened over the centuries. But how is this to be explained? ...”

“... many outstanding problems. How were they to synchronise Nabonassar’s era with eras not found in Ptolemy? Was the Olympiad year 776 or 775? Was Funck right in his use of Ptolemy to criticise Copernicus? Was the Attic year lunar or not? Did the Jews borrow their calendar from the Babylonians, so that a whole tradition would ...”

“... library to rival that of Alexandria; at its peak it contained 200,000 volumes. According to Pliny, Ptolemy of Egypt was so enraged by his neighbour’s acquisitive habits that he banned the sale of papyrus. Eumenes instructed his subjects to find an alternative writing material, and parchment was born. Where plant-based papyrus was fibrous, brittle and liable ...”