Coa vestis is an ancient type of fabric named after its point of origin, the Greek island Kos.
Coa vestis was made by the wild silk of Pachypasa otus , a Mediterranean moth. [1] Aristotle first mentioned coa vestis in the 4th century BC. [2]
The elder Pliny reported Pamphila of Kos, daughter of Plateas, discovered the secret of silk manufacture. [3]
After the 1st century AD the coa vestis was gradually superseded by Chinese silk, which was superior in quality.
The Natural History is a work by Pliny the Elder. It is one of the largest single works to have survived from the Roman Empire to the modern day and purports to cover all ancient knowledge. The work's subject area is thus not limited to what is today understood by natural history; Pliny himself defines his scope as "the natural world, or life". It is encyclopedic in scope, but its structure is not like that of a modern encyclopedia. It is the only work by Pliny to have survived, and the last that he published. He published the first 10 books in AD 77, but had not made a final revision of the remainder at the time of his death during the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius. The rest was published posthumously by Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger.
Apelles of Kos was a renowned painter of ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder, to whom much of modern scholars' knowledge of this artist is owed, rated him superior to preceding and subsequent artists. He dated Apelles to the 112th Olympiad, possibly because he had produced a portrait of Alexander the Great.
Kos or Cos is a Greek island, part of the Dodecanese island chain in the southeastern Aegean Sea. Kos is the third largest island of the Dodecanese by area, after Rhodes and Karpathos; it has a population of 33,388, making it the second most populous of the Dodecanese, after Rhodes. The island measures 40 by 8 kilometres. Administratively, Kos constitutes a municipality within the Kos regional unit, which is part of the South Aegean region. The principal town of the island and seat of the municipality is Kos Town.
A periplus or periplous is a manuscript document that lists the ports and coastal landmarks, in order and with approximate intervening distances, that the captain of a vessel could expect to find along a shore. In that sense the periplus was a type of log. It served the same purpose as the later Roman itinerarium of road stops; however, the Greek navigators added various notes which, if they were professional geographers, as many were, became part of their own additions to Greek geography.
Encyclopedism is an outlook that aims to include a wide range of knowledge in a single work. The term covers both encyclopedias themselves and related genres in which comprehensiveness is a notable feature. The word encyclopedia is a Latinization of the Greek enkýklios paideía, which means all-around education. The encyclopedia is "one of the few generalizing influences in a world of overspecialization. It serves to recall that knowledge has unity," according to Lewis Shore, editor of Collier's Encyclopedia. It should not be "a miscellany, but a concentration, a clarification, and a synthesis", according to British writer H.G. Wells
The history of science in classical antiquity encompasses both those inquiries into the workings of the universe aimed at such practical goals as establishing a reliable calendar or determining how to cure a variety of illnesses and those abstract investigations known as natural philosophy. The ancient peoples who are considered the first scientists may have thought of themselves as natural philosophers, as practitioners of a skilled profession, or as followers of a religious tradition. The encyclopedic works of Aristotle, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Galen, Ptolemy, Euclid, and others spread throughout the world. These works and the important commentaries on them were the wellspring of science.
Cius, later renamed Prusias on the Sea after king Prusias I of Bithynia, was an ancient Greek city bordering the Propontis, in Bithynia and in Mysia, and had a long history, being mentioned by Herodotus, Xenophon, Aristotle, Strabo and Apollonius Rhodius.
Assos, also known as Behramkale or for short Behram, is a small historically rich town in the Ayvacık district of the Çanakkale Province, Turkey. During Pliny the Elder's time, the city also bore the name Apollonia (Ἀπολλωνία).
Amato is a comune and town in the province of Catanzaro in the Calabria region of Italy.
Hermotimus of Clazomenae, called by Lucian a Pythagorean, was a philosopher who first proposed, before Anaxagoras the idea of mind being fundamental in the cause of change. He proposed that physical entities are static, while reason causes the change. Sextus Empiricus places him with Hesiod, Parmenides, and Empedocles, as belonging to the class of philosophers who held a dualistic theory of a material and an active principle being together the origin of the universe.
The Canal of the Pharaohs, also called the Ancient Suez Canal or Necho's Canal, is the forerunner of the Suez Canal, constructed in ancient times and kept in use, with intermissions, until being closed for good in 767 AD for strategic reasons during a rebellion. It followed a different course from its modern counterpart, by linking the Nile to the Red Sea via the Wadi Tumilat. Work began under the pharaohs. According to Darius the Great's Suez Inscriptions and Herodotus, the first opening of the canal was under Persian king Darius the Great, but later ancient authors like Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder claim that he failed to complete the work. Another possibility is that it was finished in the Ptolemaic period under Ptolemy II, when engineers solved the problem of overcoming the difference in height through canal locks.
Atarneus, also known as Atarna (Ἄταρνα) and Atarneites (Ἀταρνείτης), was an ancient Greek city in the region of Aeolis, Asia Minor. It lies on the mainland opposite the island of Lesbos. It was on the road from Adramyttium to the plain of the Caicus. Its territory was called the Atarneitis.
War pigs are pigs reported to have been used in ancient warfare as military animals, mostly as a countermeasure against war elephants.
Pamphile, Panphyle, Plateae filia or Latoi filia, was the daughter of Platea, or of Apollo (Latous), a woman of the Greek island of Kos.
The Grabaei were a minor Illyrian tribe who lived near Lake Skadar. They were mentioned by Pliny the Elder.
Nomisma was the ancient Greek word for "money" and is derived from nomos (νόμος) "anything assigned, a usage, custom, law, ordinance".
...but money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name 'money' (nomisma) – because it exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [1133b 1].
Wild silks have been known and used in many countries from early times, although the scale of production is far smaller than that from cultivated silkworms. Silk cocoons and nests often resemble paper or cloth, and their use has arisen independently in many societies.
Pachypasa otus is a moth of the family Lasiocampidae first described by Dru Drury in 1773. It is found in southern Europe, Asia Minor, Armenia, Iraq, Iran and Israel.
Sigeion was an ancient Greek city in the north-west of the Troad region of Anatolia located at the mouth of the Scamander. Sigeion commanded a ridge between the Aegean Sea and the Scamander which is now known as Yenişehir and is a part of the Çanakkale district in Çanakkale province, Turkey. The surrounding region was referred to as the Sigean Promonotory, which was frequently used as a point of reference by ancient geographers since it marked the mouth of the Hellespont. The outline of this promontory is no longer visible due to the alluvial activity of the Karamenderes which has filled in the embayment east of Yenişehir. The name 'Sigeion' means 'silent place' and is derived from Ancient Greek σιγή (sigē), 'silence'; in Classical Antiquity, the name was assumed to be antiphrastic, i.e. indicating a characteristic of the place contrary to reality, since the seas in this region are known for their fierce storms.
Pordoselene or Poroselene (Ποροσελήνη) was a town and polis (city-state) of ancient Aeolis. It was located on the chief island of the Hecatonnesi, a group of small islands lying between Lesbos and the coast of Asia Minor, which was also called Prodoselene. Strabo says that some, in order to avoid the dirty allusion presented by this name, called it Poroselene, which is the form employed by Ptolemy, Pliny the Elder, and Aelian. At a still later time the name was changed into Proselene, under which form the town appears as a bishop's see. Aristotle mentions the town in his History of Animals where it was on the extremity of a road that formed the border between an area of the island that contained weasels and another area that did not have them.