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Book of the Uppermost page 4 a
Michelangelo Zetterquist
(see more by this artist)
Born between AD 350 and 370; died March 415. Hypatia was a co-creator of the revolutionary concept of Heliocentrism, the idea that the earth and all other planets revolve around the sun. She was lecturer at the great library of Alexandria and was a witness to its destruction in 391 AD. Shortly afterward she was murdered by the same angry mob. Hypatia has been presented as the Sphinx with a great library built up inside of it. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world The Lighthouse of Alexandria has been built proverbially onto her head. It has been written by ancient sources that Hypatia was the inventor of the astrolabe which I will most likely place above the tower to show that her ideas were a source of light
I knew about the Library of Alexandria burning down the first (and what I thought was the only time), but among other things I didn't know that in 48 BC it took place. This is significant because the most famous story in Rome was going on at the time. I didn't know it was Julius Caesar who after burning his own ships in a what turned out to be a brilliant military strategy then caught the whole shore in Alexandria on fire "accidentally" in which led to the burning of the library. I saw this in an outdated movie called Cleopatra, with Elizabeth Taylor. A movie that I hadn't seen since I was a little kid. The actors in it are all stiff but there were many useful facts, this was one of them. I found out by reading on-line that Marc Antony had felt so bad about this horrible mess, that later when he was in Egypt married to the his new Queen Cleopatra, he ransacked the building at the ancient Greek library in Pergamon and stole the whole collection, only to give its literary treasures to her as a gift.
This was the first burning BC 48.
The second burning was in 391.
History paints Hypatia as a brilliant woman, without a doubt one could compare her intelligence level to a Galileo, or Sir Isaac Newton. Aristotle and Ptolemy were said to be her idols long past. These being the school of though and the prevailing minds for her time; their books taught that the earth was the center of the universe. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and he mentions this fact.
She was so far ahead of her time, she would help create the ideas that eventually hundreds of years later Copernicus and Galileo would start humanity on a different and more correct path using her ideas.
I found two accounts from either side of the religious struggle going on at the time and later on in the streets of Alexandria pertaining to the death of Hypatia.
Socrates Scholasticus 5th century recorded:
"Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy, which at that time prevailed. For, as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported, among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them, therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and, dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her by scraping her skin off with tiles and bits of shell. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them
John of Nikiu 7th century recorded:
"And, in those days, there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes, and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through Satanic wiles . . . A multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the Magistrate . . . and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the Prefect through her enchantments. And when they learnt the place where she was, they proceeded to her and found her . . . they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesareum. Now this was in the days of the fast. And they tore off her clothing and dragged her . . . through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire."
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