ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Heron's Pneumatica: A Work in Progress between Technology and Ancient Text

• In Event: Findings in Digital Humanities 1: Ancient

English Abstract

In this conference I would like to give notice to the academic community of a project that I’m carrying on, merging classical education and new technologies in order to reach an innovative way of divulgation of ancient technical knowledge. I will show the process that is leading to a newly translated edition of Hero Alexandrinus’ Pneumatica, a project that involve classical times, history of science knowledge and modern 3D reconstruction. In my speech I would like to present this new way of cooperation: thanks to actual technology, the new edition of Hero’s work will be supported by 3D digital reconstructions of the contrivances described there. This will lead for the first time in the modern era to have a more realistic rendering of the devices, allowing the reader to have beside the transalted text an enyoable digital reconstruction, more immersive than the pictures and diagrams that we are used to find in manuscripts and editions. This will be a leading experiment to prove the benefits of the union of different skills aiming to a better understanding of ancient scientific and technical knowledge. Furthermore, talking about the guidelines of the comment, I will underline the necessity of dealing with literary texts and archeological fundings in order to recreate a more coherent historical scenario, where the technical knowledge of Greeks and Romans and his outcomes are placed in their real ancient context, ascertaining that ancient pneumatic devices were constructed for real by people like Ctesibius, Phylo of Byzantium or Hero Alexandrinus himself.

Author

• Michele Corti, University of Siena - Museo Galileo