The Evolution of Knowledge - A Scientific Meeting in Honor of Jürgen Renn

Session

The Spread of Knowledge

Jul 16, 2025, 9:40 AM

Main Hall (SISSA)

29. Chair:Gerd Grasshoff

Gerd Grasshoff

7/16/25, 9:40 AM

44. How many climate zones? The spread of cosmographic knowledge in the early modern period

Matteo Valleriani

7/16/25, 9:45 AM

The ancient authoritative subdivision of the inhabitable regions of Earth into seven climate zones began to be challenged during the 16th century.
As the related knowledge was mostly displayed in the form of computational tables, and since the analysis of available sources exceeds human capacities because of their number and complexity, the sources relevant to the purpose of this paper are...

42. The “Iron-eating bird” on the Silk Roads: the cross-cultural study of circulation of ostrich diet myths

Wei Chen

7/16/25, 10:05 AM

Abstract: The ostrich was a representative species in the cross-cultural exchanges along the ancient Silk Road. In addition to its striking materiality, myths about ostriches swallowing charcoal and iron, and furthermore refining iron from their bellies, were spread across various cultures in a wide geographical area, including Hebrew, Islamic, Christian Europe and China. These myths have...

9. Re-orienting studies of knowledge dissemination in and from Islamicate societies

Sonja Brentjes (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

7/16/25, 11:00 AM

Most studies of the dissemination of knowledge among Islamicate societies have focused on the early Abbasid period, as well as the transport of manuscripts and the travel of people between al-Andalus, North Africa and the central Muslim lands until about the end of the Abbasid caliphate. A second field of research concerns their translations into Latin, derived vernaculars and into Hebrew in...

8. Alphabets, dictionaries and grammars

Jens Braarvig (University of Oslo)

7/16/25, 11:30 AM

The talk will investigate the role of scholarly philological activity in the evolution and spread of knowledge by posing a number of historical cases for analysing the crucial importance of linguistic tools for the globalisation of knowledge. The cases will include that of Armenia, further of Georgia and Tibet, as well as the activities around creating the Cyrillic writing system, but will put...

47. Speaker: José Montesinos

José Montesinos

7/16/25, 11:50 AM

30. Discussion

Matteo Valleriani

7/16/25, 12:10 PM