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Hypatia

Hypatia (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy. Although preceded by Pandrosion, another Alexandrian female mathematician, she is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. Hypatia was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. She wrote a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume Arithmetica, which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's original text, and another commentary on Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections, which has not survived. Many modern scholars also believe that Hypatia may have edited the surviving text of Ptolemy's Almagest, based on the title of her father Theon's commentary on Book III of the Almagest.

Hypatia constructed astrolabes and hydrometers, but did not invent either of these, which were both in use long before she was born. She was tolerant toward Christians and taught many Christian students, including Synesius, the future bishop of Ptolemais. Ancient sources record that Hypatia was widely beloved by pagans and Christians alike and that she established great influence with the political elite in Alexandria. Toward the end of her life, Hypatia advised Orestes, the Roman prefect of Alexandria, who was in the midst of a political feud with Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria. Rumors spread accusing her of preventing Orestes from reconciling with Cyril and, in March 415 AD, she was murdered by a mob of Christians led by a lector named Peter.

Hypatia's murder shocked the empire and transformed her into a "martyr for philosophy", leading future Neoplatonists such as the historian Damascius (c. 458) to become increasingly fervent in their opposition to Christianity. During the Middle Ages, Hypatia was co-opted as a symbol of Christian virtue and scholars believe she was part of the basis for the legend of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. During the Age of Enlightenment, she became a symbol of opposition to Catholicism. In the nineteenth century, European literature, especially Charles Kingsley's 1853 novel Hypatia, romanticized her as "the last of the Hellenes". In the twentieth century, Hypatia became seen as an icon for women's rights and a precursor to the feminist movement. Since the late twentieth century, some portrayals have associated Hypatia's death with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, despite the historical fact that the library no longer existed during Hypatia's lifetime.

Upbringing

Hypatia was the daughter of the mathematician Theon of Alexandria (c. 335). According to classical historian Edward J. Watts, Theon was the head of a school called the "Mouseion", which was named in emulation of the Hellenistic Mouseion, whose membership had ceased in the 260s AD. Theon's school was exclusive, highly prestigious, and doctrinally conservative. Theon rejected the teachings of Iamblichus and may have taken pride in teaching a pure, Plotinian Neoplatonism. Although he was widely seen as a great mathematician at the time, Theon's mathematical work has been deemed by modern standards as essentially "minor", "trivial", and "completely unoriginal". His primary achievement was the production of a new edition of Euclid's Elements, in which he corrected scribal errors that had been made over the course of nearly 700 years of copying. Theon's edition of Euclid's Elements became the most widely used edition of the textbook for centuries and almost totally supplanted all other editions.

Nothing is known about Hypatia's mother, who is never mentioned in any of the extant sources. Theon dedicates his commentary on Book IV of Ptolemy's Almagest to an individual named Epiphanius, addressing him as "my dear son", indicating that he may have been Hypatia's brother, but the Greek word Theon uses (teknon) does not always mean "son" in the biological sense and was often used merely to signal strong feelings of paternal connection. Hypatia's exact year of birth is still under debate, with suggested dates ranging from 350 to 370 AD. Many scholars have followed Richard Hoche in inferring that Hypatia was born around 370. According to Damascius's lost work Life of Isidore, preserved in the entry for Hypatia in the Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia, Hypatia flourished during the reign of Arcadius. Hoche reasoned that Damascius's description of her physical beauty would imply that she was at most 30 at that time, and the year 370 was 30 years prior to the midpoint of Arcadius's reign. In contrast, theories that she was born as early as 350 are based on the wording of the chronicler John Malalas (c. 491 – 578), who calls her old at the time of her death in 415. Robert Penella argues that both theories are weakly based, and that her birth date should be left unspecified.

Career
Hypatia was a Neoplatonist, but, like her father, she rejected the teachings of Iamblichus and instead embraced the original Neoplatonism formulated by Plotinus. The Alexandrian school was renowned at the time for its philosophy, and Alexandria was regarded as second only to Athens as the philosophical capital of the Greco-Roman world. Hypatia taught students from all over the Mediterranean. According to Damascius, she lectured on the writings of Plato and Aristotle. He also states that she walked through Alexandria in a tribon, a kind of cloak associated with philosophers, giving impromptu public lectures.

According to Watts, two main varieties of Neoplatonism were taught in Alexandria during the late fourth century. The first was the overtly pagan religious Neoplatonism taught at the Serapeum, which was greatly influenced by the teachings of Iamblichus. The second variety was the more moderate and less polemical variety championed by Hypatia and her father Theon, which was based on the teachings of Plotinus. Although Hypatia was a pagan, she was tolerant of Christians. In fact, every one of her known students was Christian. One of her most prominent pupils was Synesius of Cyrene, who went on to become a bishop of Ptolemais (now in eastern Libya) in 410. Afterward, he continued to exchange letters with Hypatia and his extant letters are the main sources of information about her career. Seven letters by Synesius to Hypatia have survived, but none from her addressed to him are extant. In a letter written in around 395 to his friend Herculianus, Synesius describes Hypatia as "... a person so renowned, her reputation seemed literally incredible. We have seen and heard for ourselves she who honorably presides over the mysteries of philosophy." Synesius preserves the legacy of Hypatia's opinions and teachings, such as the pursuit of "the philosophical state of apatheia—complete liberation from emotions and affections".

The Christian historian Socrates of Constantinople, a contemporary of Hypatia, describes her in his Ecclesiastical History:

"There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in the presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more."

Philostorgius, another Christian historian, who was also a contemporary of Hypatia, states that she excelled her father in mathematics and the lexicographer Hesychius of Alexandria records that, like her father, she was also an extraordinarily talented astronomer. Damascius writes that Hypatia was "exceedingly beautiful and fair of form", but nothing else is known regarding her physical appearance and no ancient depictions of her have survived. Damascius states that Hypatia remained a lifelong virgin and that, when one of the men who came to her lectures tried to court her, she tried to soothe his lust by playing the lyre. When he refused to abandon his pursuit, she rejected him outright, displaying her bloody menstrual rags and declaring "This is what you really love, my young man, but you do not love beauty for its own sake." Damascius further relates that the young man was so traumatized that he abandoned his desires for her immediately.

Background

From 382 – 412, the bishop of Alexandria was Theophilus. Theophilus was militantly opposed to Iamblichean Neoplatonism and, in 391, he demolished the Serapeum. Despite this, Theophilus tolerated Hypatia's school and seems to have regarded Hypatia as his ally. Theophilus supported the bishopric of Hypatia's pupil Synesius, who describes Theophilus in his letters with love and admiration. Theophilus also permitted Hypatia to establish close relationships with the Roman prefects and other prominent political leaders. Partly as a result of Theophilus's tolerance, Hypatia became extremely popular with the people of Alexandria and exerted profound political influence.

Theophilus died unexpectedly in 412. He had been training his nephew Cyril, but had not officially named him as his successor. A violent power struggle over the diocese broke out between Cyril and his rival Timothy. Cyril won and immediately began to punish the opposing faction; he closed the churches of the Novatianists, who had supported Timothy, and confiscated their property. Hypatia's school seems to have immediately taken a strong distrust toward the new bishop, as evidenced by the fact that, in all his vast correspondences, Synesius only ever wrote one letter to Cyril, in which he treats the younger bishop as inexperienced and misguided. In a letter written to Hypatia in 413, Synesius requests her to intercede on behalf of two individuals impacted by the ongoing civil strife in Alexandria, insisting, "You always have power, and you can bring about good by using that power." He also reminds her that she had taught him that a Neoplatonic philosopher must introduce the highest moral standards to political life and act for the benefit of their fellow citizens.

According to Socrates Scholasticus, in 414, following an exchange of hostilities and a Jewish-led massacre, Cyril closed all the synagogues in Alexandria, confiscated all the property belonging to the Jews, and expelled a number of Jews from the city; Scholasticus suggests all the Jews were expelled, while John of Nikiu notes it was only those involved in the massacre. Orestes, the Roman prefect of Alexandria, who was also a close friend of Hypatia and a recent convert to Christianity, was outraged by Cyril's actions and sent a scathing report to the emperor. The conflict escalated and a riot broke out in which the parabalani, a group of Christian clerics under Cyril's authority, nearly killed Orestes. As punishment, Orestes had Ammonius, the monk who had started the riot, publicly tortured to death. Cyril tried to proclaim Ammonius a martyr, but Christians in Alexandria were disgusted, since Ammonius had been killed for inciting a riot and attempting to murder the governor, not for his faith. Prominent Alexandrian Christians intervened and forced Cyril to drop the matter. Nonetheless, Cyril's feud with Orestes continued. Orestes frequently consulted Hypatia for advice because she was well-liked among both pagans and Christians alike, she had not been involved in any previous stages of the conflict, and she had an impeccable reputation as a wise counselor.

Despite Hypatia's popularity, Cyril and his allies attempted to discredit her and undermine her reputation. Socrates Scholasticus mentions rumors accusing Hypatia of preventing Orestes from reconciling with Cyril. Traces of other rumors that spread among the Christian populace of Alexandria may be found in the writings of the seventh-century Egyptian Coptic bishop John of Nikiû, who alleges in his Chronicle that Hypatia had engaged in satanic practices and had intentionally hampered the church's influence over Orestes:

"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 her Satanic wiles. And the governor of the city honoured her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic. And he ceased attending church as had been his custom... And he not only did this, but he drew many believers to her, and he himself received the unbelievers at his house."

Murder
According to Socrates Scholasticus, during the Christian season of Lent in March 415, a mob of Christians under the leadership of a lector named Peter raided Hypatia's carriage as she was travelling home. They dragged her into a building known as the Kaisarion, a former pagan temple and center of the Roman imperial cult in Alexandria that had been converted into a Christian church. There, the mob stripped Hypatia naked and murdered her using ostraka, which can either be translated as "roof tiles", "oyster shells" or simply "shards". Damascius adds that they also cut out her eyeballs. They tore her body into pieces and dragged her limbs through the town to a place called Cinarion, where they set them on fire. According to Watts, this was in line with the traditional manner in which Alexandrians carried the bodies of the "vilest criminals" outside the city limits to cremate them as a way of symbolically purifying the city. Although Socrates Scholasticus never explicitly identifies Hypatia's murderers, they are commonly assumed to have been members of the parabalani. Christopher Haas disputes this identification, arguing that the murderers were more likely "a crowd of Alexandrian laymen".

Socrates Scholasticus presents Hypatia's murder as entirely politically motivated and makes no mention of any role that Hypatia's paganism might have played in her death. Instead, he reasons that "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." Socrates Scholasticus unequivocally condemns the actions of the mob, declaring, "Surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort."

The Canadian mathematician Ari Belenkiy has argued that Hypatia may have been involved in a controversy over the date of the Christian holiday of Easter 417 and that she was killed on the vernal equinox while making astronomical observations. Classical scholars Alan Cameron and Edward J. Watts both dismiss this hypothesis, noting that there is absolutely no evidence in any ancient text to support any part of the hypothesis.

Aftermath
Hypatia's death sent shockwaves throughout the empire; for centuries, philosophers had been seen as effectively untouchable during the displays of public violence that sometimes occurred in Roman cities and the murder of a female philosopher at the hand of a mob was seen as "profoundly dangerous and destabilizing". Although no concrete evidence was ever discovered definitively linking Cyril to the murder of Hypatia, it was widely believed that he had ordered it. Even if Cyril had not directly ordered the murder, his smear campaign against Hypatia had inspired it. The Alexandrian council was alarmed at Cyril's conduct and sent an embassy to Constantinople. The advisors of Theodosius II launched an investigation to determine Cyril's role in the murder.

The investigation resulted in the emperors Honorius and Theodosius II issuing an edict in autumn of 416, which attempted to remove the parabalani from Cyril's power and instead place them under the authority of Orestes. The edict restricted the parabalani from attending "any public spectacle whatever" or entering "the meeting place of a municipal council or a courtroom." It also severely restricted their recruitment by limiting the total number of parabalani to no more than five hundred. According to Damascius, Cyril allegedly only managed to escape even more serious punishment by bribing one of Theodosius's officials. Watts argues that Hypatia's murder was the turning point in Cyril's fight to gain political control of Alexandria. Hypatia had been the linchpin holding Orestes's opposition against Cyril together, and, without her, the opposition quickly collapsed. Two years later, Cyril overturned the law placing the parabalani under Orestes's control and, by the early 420s, Cyril had come to dominate the Alexandrian council.

Works
Hypatia has been described as a universal genius, but she was probably more of a teacher and commentator than an innovator. No evidence has been found that Hypatia ever published any independent works on philosophy and she does not appear to have made any groundbreaking mathematical discoveries. During Hypatia's time period, scholars preserved classical mathematical works and commented on them to develop their arguments, rather than publishing original works. It has also been suggested that the closure of the Mouseion and the destruction of the Serapeum may have led Hypatia and her father to focus their efforts on preserving seminal mathematical books and making them accessible to their students. The Suda mistakenly states that all of Hypatia's writings have been lost, but modern scholarship has identified several works by her as extant. This kind of authorial uncertainty is typical of female philosophers from antiquity. Hypatia wrote in Greek, which was the language spoken by most educated people in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time. In classical antiquity, astronomy was seen as being essentially mathematical in character. Furthermore, no distinction was made between mathematics and numerology or astronomy and astrology.

Edition of the Almagest

Hypatia is now known to have edited the existing text of Book III of Ptolemy's Almagest. It was once thought that Hypatia had merely revised Theon's commentary on the Almagest, based on the title of Theon's commentary on the third book of Almagest, which reads "Commentary by Theon of Alexandria on Book III of Ptolemy's Almagest, edition revised by my daughter Hypatia, the philosopher", but, based on analysis of the titles of Theon's other commentaries and similar titles from the time period, scholars have concluded that Hypatia corrected, not her father's commentary, but the text of Almagest itself. Her contribution is thought to be an improved method for the long division algorithms needed for astronomical computation. The Ptolemaic model of the universe was geocentric, meaning it taught that the Sun revolved around the Earth. In the Almagest, Ptolemy proposed a division problem for calculating the number of degrees swept out by the Sun in a single day as it orbits the Earth. In his early commentary, Theon had tried to improve upon Ptolemy's division calculation. In the text edited by Hypatia, a tabular method is detailed. This tabular method might be the "astronomical table" which historic sources attribute to Hypatia. Classicist Alan Cameron additionally states that it is possible Hypatia may have edited, not only Book III, but all nine extant books of the Almagest.

Independent writings

Hypatia wrote a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume Arithmetica, which had been written sometime around the year 250 AD. It set out more than 100 mathematical problems, for which solutions are proposed using algebra. For centuries, scholars believed that this commentary had been lost. Only volumes one through six of the Arithmetica have survived in the original Greek, but at least four additional volumes have been preserved in an Arabic translation produced around the year 860. The Arabic text contains numerous expansions not found in the Greek text, including verifications of Diophantus's examples and additional problems.

Cameron states that the most likely source of the additional material is Hypatia, since Hypatia is the only ancient writer known to have written a commentary on the Arithmetica and the additions appear to follow the same methods used by her father Theon. The first person to deduce that the additional material in the Arabic manuscripts came from Hypatia was the nineteenth-century scholar Paul Tannery. In 1885, Sir Thomas Heath published the first English translation of the surviving portion of the Arithmetica. Heath argued that surviving text of Arithmetica is actually a school edition produced by Hypatia to aid her students. According to Mary Ellen Waithe, Hypatia used an unusual algorithm for division (in the then-standard sexagesimal numeral system), making it easy for scholars to pick out which parts of the text she had written.

The consensus that Hypatia's commentary is the source of the additional material in the Arabic manuscripts of the Arithmetica has been challenged by Wilbur Knorr, a historian of mathematics, who argues that the interpolations are "of such low level as not to require any real mathematical insight" and that the author of the interpolations can only have been "an essentially trivial mind... in direct conflict with ancient testimonies of Hypatia's high caliber as a philosopher and mathematician." Cameron rejects this argument, noting that "Theon too enjoyed a high reputation, yet his surviving work has been judged 'completely unoriginal.'" Cameron also insists that "Hypatia's work on Diophantus was what we today might call a school edition, designed for the use of students rather than professional mathematicians."

Hypatia also wrote a commentary on Apollonius of Perga's work on conic sections, but this commentary is not extant. She also created an "Astronomical Canon"; this is believed to have been either a new edition of the Handy Tables by the Alexandrian Ptolemy or the aforementioned commentary on his Almagest. Based on a close reading in comparison with her supposed contributions to the work of Diophantus, Knorr suggests that Hypatia may also have edited Archimedes' Measurement of a Circle, an anonymous text on isometric figures, and a text later used by John of Tynemouth in his work on Archimedes' measurement of the sphere. A high degree of mathematical accomplishment would have been needed to comment on Apollonius's advanced mathematics or the astronomical Canon. Because of this, most scholars today recognize that Hypatia must have been among the leading mathematicians of her day.

Reputed inventions

One of Synesius's letters describes Hypatia as having taught him how to construct a silver plane astrolabe as a gift for an official. An astrolabe is a device used to calculate date and time based on the positions of the stars and planets. It can also be used to predict where the stars and planets will be on any given date. A "little astrolabe", or "plane astrolabe", is a kind of astrolabe that used stereographic projection of the celestial sphere to represent the heavens on a plane surface, as opposed to an armillary sphere, which was globe-shaped. Armillary spheres were large and normally used for display, whereas a plane astrolabe was portable and could be used for practical measurements.

The statement from Synesius's letter has sometimes been wrongly interpreted to mean that Hypatia invented the plane astrolabe, but the plane astrolabe was in use at least 500 years before Hypatia was born. Hypatia may have learned how to construct a plane astrolabe from her father Theon, who had written two treatises on astrolabes: one entitled Memoirs on the Little Astrolabe and another study on the armillary sphere in Ptolemy's Almagest. Theon's treatise is now lost, but it was well known to the Syrian bishop Severus Sebokht (575–667), who describes its contents in his own treatise on astrolabes. Hypatia and Theon may have also studied Ptolemy's Planisphaerium, which describes the calculations necessary in order to construct an astrolabe. Synesius's wording indicates that Hypatia did not design or construct the astrolabe, but acted as a guide and mentor during the process of constructing it.

In another letter, Synesius requests Hypatia to construct him a "hydroscope", a device now known as a hydrometer, to determine the density or specific gravity of liquids. Based on this request, it has been claimed that Hypatia invented the hydrometer. The minute detail in which Synesius describes the instrument, however, indicates that he assumes she has never heard of the device, but trusts she will be able to replicate it based on a verbal description. Hydrometers were based on Archimedes' 3rd century BC principles, may have been invented by him, and were being described by the 2nd century AD in a poem by the Roman author Remnius. Although modern authors frequently credit Hypatia with having developed a variety of other inventions, these other attributions may all be discounted as spurious. Booth concludes, "The modern day reputation held by Hypatia as a philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, and mechanical inventor, is disproportionate to the amount of surviving evidence of her life's work. This reputation is either built on myth or hearsay as opposed to evidence. Either that or we are missing all of the evidence that would support it."

Antiquity
Neoplatonism and paganism both survived for centuries after Hypatia's death, and new academic lecture halls continued to be built in Alexandria after her death. Over the next 200 years, Neoplatonist philosophers such as Hierocles of Alexandria, John Philoponus, Simplicius of Cilicia, and Olympiodorus the Younger made astronomical observations, taught mathematics, and wrote lengthy commentaries on the works of Plato and Aristotle. Hypatia was not the last female Neoplatonist philosopher; later ones include Aedesia, Asclepigenia, and Theodora of Emesa.

According to Watts, however, Hypatia had no appointed successor, no spouse, and no offspring and her sudden death not only left her legacy unprotected, but also triggered a backlash against her entire ideology. Hypatia, with her tolerance toward Christian students and her willingness to cooperate with Christian leaders, had hoped to establish a precedent that Neoplatonism and Christianity could coexist peacefully and cooperatively. Instead, her death and the subsequent failure by the Christian government to impose justice on her killers destroyed that notion entirely and led future Neoplatonists such as Damascius to consider Christian bishops as "dangerous, jealous figures who were also utterly unphilosophical." Hypatia became seen as a "martyr for philosophy", and her murder led philosophers to adopt attitudes that increasingly emphasized the pagan aspects of their beliefs system and helped create a sense of identity for philosophers as pagan traditionalists set apart from the Christian masses. Thus, while Hypatia's death did not bring an end to Neoplatonist philosophy as a whole, Watts argues that it did bring an end to her particular variety of it.

Shortly after Hypatia's murder, a forged anti-Christian letter appeared under her name. Damascius was "anxious to exploit the scandal of Hypatia's death", and attributed responsibility for her murder to Bishop Cyril and his Christian followers. A passage from Damascius's Life of Isidore, preserved in the Suda, concludes that Hypatia's murder was due to Cyril's envy over "her wisdom exceeding all bounds and especially in the things concerning astronomy". Damascius's account of the Christian murder of Hypatia is the sole historical source attributing direct responsibility to Bishop Cyril. At the same time, Damascius was not entirely kind to Hypatia either; he characterizes her as nothing more than a wandering Cynic, and compares her unfavorably with his own teacher Isidore of Alexandria, remarking that "Isidorus greatly outshone Hypatia, not just as a man does over a woman, but in the way a genuine philosopher will over a mere geometer."

Middle Ages

Hypatia's death was similar to those of Christian martyrs in Alexandria, who had been dragged through the streets during the Decian persecution in 250. Other aspects of Hypatia's life also fit the mold for a Christian martyr, especially her lifelong virginity. In the Early Middle Ages, Christians conflated Hypatia's death with stories of the Decian martyrs and she became part of the basis for the legend of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a virgin martyr said to have been exceedingly wise and well-educated. The earliest attestation for the cult of Saint Catherine comes from the eighth century, around three hundred years after Hypatia's death. One story tells of Saint Catherine being confronted by fifty pagan philosophers seeking to convert her, but instead converting all of them to Christianity through her eloquence. Another legend claimed that Saint Catherine had been a student of Athanasius of Alexandria. In the Laodikeia of Asia Minor (today Denizli in Turkey) until late 19th century Hypatia was venerated as identical to St. Catherine.

The Byzantine Suda encyclopedia contains a very long entry about Hypatia, which summarizes two different accounts of her life. The first eleven lines come from one source and the rest of the entry comes from Damascius's Life of Isidore. Most of the first eleven lines of the entry probably come from Hesychius's Onomatologos, but some parts are of unknown origin, including a claim that she was "the wife of Isidore the Philosopher" (apparently Isidore of Alexandria). Watts describes this as a very puzzling claim, not only because Isidore of Alexandria was not born until long after Hypatia's death, and no other philosopher of that name contemporary with Hypatia is known, but also because it contradicts Damascius's own statement quoted in the same entry about Hypatia being a lifelong virgin. Watts suggests that someone probably misunderstood the meaning of the word gynē used by Damascius to describe Hypatia in his Life of Isidore, since the same word can mean either "woman" or "wife".

The Byzantine and Christian intellectual Photios (c. 810/820–893) includes both Damascius's account of Hypatia and Socrates Scholasticus's in his Bibliotheke. In his own comments, Photios remarks on Hypatia's great fame as a scholar, but does not mention her death, perhaps indicating that he saw her scholarly work as more significant. The intellectual Eudokia Makrembolitissa (1021–1096), the second wife of Byzantine emperor Constantine X Doukas, was described by the historian Nicephorus Gregoras as a "second Hypatia".

Early modern period

Early eighteenth-century Deist scholar John Toland used the murder of Hypatia as the basis for an anti-Catholic tract, portraying Hypatia's death in the worst possible light by changing the story and inventing elements not found in any of the ancient sources. A 1721 response by Thomas Lewis defended Cyril, rejected Damascius's account as unreliable because its author was "a heathen" and argued that Socrates Scholasticus was "a Puritan", who was consistently biased against Cyril.

Voltaire, in his Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke ou le tombeau de fanatisme (1736) interpreted Hypatia as a believer in "the laws of rational Nature" and "the capacities of the human mind free of dogmas" and described her death as "a bestial murder perpetrated by Cyril's tonsured hounds, with a fanatical gang at their heels". Later, in an entry for his Dictionnaire philosophique (1772), Voltaire again portrayed Hypatia as a freethinking deistic genius brutally murdered by ignorant and misunderstanding Christians. Most of the entry ignores Hypatia altogether and instead deals with the controversy over whether or not Cyril was responsible for her death. Voltaire concludes with the snide remark that "When one strips beautiful women naked, it is not to massacre them."

In his monumental work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the English historian Edward Gibbon expanded on Toland and Voltaire's misleading portrayals by declaring Cyril as the sole cause of all evil in Alexandria at the beginning of the fifth century and construing Hypatia's murder as evidence to support his thesis that the rise of Christianity hastened the decline of the Roman Empire. He remarks on Cyril's continued veneration as a Christian saint, commenting that "superstition [Christianity] perhaps would more gently expiate the blood of a virgin, than the banishment of a saint." In response to these accusations, Catholic authors, as well as some French Protestants, insisted with increased vehemence that Cyril had absolutely no involvement in Hypatia's murder and that Peter the Lector was solely responsible. In the course of these heated debates, Hypatia tended to be cast aside and ignored, while the debates focused far more intently on the question of whether Peter the Lector had acted alone or under Cyril's orders.

Nineteenth century
In the nineteenth century European literary authors spun the legend of Hypatia as part of neo-Hellenism, a movement that romanticised ancient Greeks and their values. Interest in the "literary legend of Hypatia" began to rise. Diodata Saluzzo Roero's 1827 Ipazia ovvero delle Filosofie suggested that Cyril had actually converted Hypatia to Christianity, and that she had been killed by a "treacherous" priest.

In his 1852 Hypatie and 1857 Hypathie et Cyrille, French poet Charles Leconte de Lisle portrayed Hypatia as the epitome of "vulnerable truth and beauty". Leconte de Lisle's first poem portrayed Hypatia as a woman born after her time, a victim of the laws of history. His second poem reverted to the eighteenth-century Deistic portrayal of Hypatia as the victim of Christian brutality, but with the twist that Hypatia tries and fails to convince Cyril that Neoplatonism and Christianity are actually fundamentally the same. Charles Kingsley's 1853 novel Hypatia; Or, New Foes with an Old Face was originally intended as a historical treatise, but instead became a typical mid-Victorian romance with a militantly anti-Catholic message, portraying Hypatia as a "helpless, pretentious, and erotic heroine" with the "spirit of Plato and the body of Aphrodite."

Kingsley's novel was tremendously popular; it was translated into several European languages and remained continuously in print for the rest of the century. It promoted the romantic vision of Hypatia as "the last of the Hellenes" and was quickly adapted into a broad variety of stage productions, the first of which was a play written by Elizabeth Bowers, performed in Philadelphia in 1859, starring the writer in the titular role. On 2 January 1893, a much higher-profile stage play adaptation Hypatia, written by G. Stuart Ogilvie and produced by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, opened at the Haymarket Theatre in London. The title role was initially played by Julia Neilson, and it featured an elaborate musical score written by the composer Hubert Parry. The novel also spawned works of visual art, including an 1867 image portraying Hypatia as a young woman by the early photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and an 1885 painting by Charles William Mitchell showing a nude Hypatia standing before an altar in a church.

At the same time, European philosophers and scientists described Hypatia as the last representative of science and free inquiry before a "long medieval decline". In 1843, German authors Soldan and Heppe argued in their highly influential History of the Witchcraft Trials that Hypatia may have been, in effect, the first famous "witch" punished under Christian authority (see witch-hunt).

Hypatia was honored as an astronomer when 238 Hypatia, a main belt asteroid discovered in 1884, was named for her. The lunar crater Hypatia was also named for her, in addition to craters named for her father Theon. The 180 km Rimae Hypatia are located north of the crater, one degree south of the equator, along the Mare Tranquillitatis.

Twentieth century
In 1908, American writer Elbert Hubbard published a putative biography of Hypatia in his series Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers. The book is almost entirely a work of fiction. In it, Hubbard relates a completely made-up physical exercise program which he claims Theon established for his daughter, involving "fishing, horseback-riding, and rowing". He claims that Theon taught Hypatia to "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than to never think at all." Hubbard claims that, as a young woman, Hypatia traveled to Athens, where she studied under Plutarch of Athens. All of this supposed biographical information, however, is completely fictional and is not found in any ancient source. Hubbard even attributes to Hypatia numerous completely fabricated quotations in which she presents modern, rationalist views. The cover illustration for the book, a drawing of Hypatia by artist Jules Maurice Gaspard showing her as a beautiful young woman with her wavy hair tied back in the classical style, has now become the most iconic and widely reproduced image of her.

Around the same time, Hypatia was adopted by feminists, and her life and death began to be viewed in the light of the women's rights movement. The author Carlo Pascal claimed in 1908 that her murder was an anti-feminist act and brought about a change in the treatment of women, as well as the decline of the Mediterranean civilization in general. Dora Russell published a book on the inadequate education of women and inequality with the title Hypatia or Woman and Knowledge in 1925. The prologue explains why she chose the title: "Hypatia was a university lecturer denounced by Church dignitaries and torn to pieces by Christians. Such will probably be the fate of this book." Hypatia's death became symbolic for some historians. For example, Kathleen Wider proposes that the murder of Hypatia marked the end of Classical antiquity, and Stephen Greenblatt writes that her murder "effectively marked the downfall of Alexandrian intellectual life". On the other hand, Christian Wildberg notes that Hellenistic philosophy continued to flourish in the 5th and 6th centuries, and perhaps until the age of Justinian I.

Falsehoods and misconceptions about Hypatia continued to proliferate throughout the late twentieth century. Though Hubbard's fictional biography may have been intended for children, Lynn M. Osen relied on it as her main source in her influential 1974 article on Hypatia in her 1974 book Women in Mathematics. Fordham University used Hubbard's biography as the main source of information about Hypatia in a medieval history course. Carl Sagan's 1980 PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage relates a heavily fictionalized retelling of Hypatia's death, which results in the "Great Library of Alexandria" being burned by militant Christians. In actuality, though Christians led by Theophilus did destroy the Serapeum in 391 AD, the Library of Alexandria had already ceased to exist in any recognizable form centuries prior to Hypatia's birth. As a female intellectual, Hypatia became a role model for modern intelligent women and two feminist journals were named after her: the Greek journal Hypatia: Feminist Studies was launched in Athens in 1984, and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy in the United States in 1986. In the United Kingdom, the Hypatia Trust maintains a library and archive of feminine literary, artistic and scientific work; and, sponsors the Hypatia-in-the-Woods women's retreat in Washington, United States.

Judy Chicago's large-scale art piece The Dinner Party awards Hypatia a table setting. The table runner depicts Hellenistic goddesses weeping over her death. Chicago states that the social unrest leading to Hypatia's murder resulted from Roman patriarchy and mistreatment of women and that this ongoing unrest can only be brought to an end through the restoration of an original, primeval matriarchy. She (anachronistically and incorrectly) concludes that Hypatia's writings were burned in the Library of Alexandria when it was destroyed. Major works of twentieth century literature contain references to Hypatia, including Marcel Proust's volume "Within a Budding Grove" from In Search of Lost Time, and Iain Pears's The Dream of Scipio.

Twenty-first century
Hypatia has continued to be a popular subject in both fiction and nonfiction by authors in many countries and languages. In 2015, the planet designated Iota Draconis b was named after Hypatia.

In Umberto Eco's 2002 novel Baudolino, the hero's love interest is a half-satyr, half-woman descendant of a female-only community of Hypatia's disciples, collectively known as "hypatias". Charlotte Kramer's 2006 novel Holy Murder: the Death of Hypatia of Alexandria portrays Cyril as an archetypal villain, while Hypatia is described as brilliant, beloved, and more knowledgeable of scripture than Cyril. Ki Longfellow's novel Flow Down Like Silver (2009) invents an elaborate backstory for why Hypatia first started teaching. Youssef Ziedan's novel Azazeel (2012) describes Hypatia's murder through the eyes of a witness. Bruce MacLennan's 2013 book The Wisdom of Hypatia presents Hypatia as a guide who introduces Neoplatonic philosophy and exercises for modern life. In The Plot to Save Socrates (2006) by Paul Levinson and its sequels, Hypatia is a time-traveler from the twenty-first century United States. In the TV series The Good Place, Hypatia is played by Lisa Kudrow as one of the few ancient philosophers eligible for heaven, by not having defended slavery.

The 2009 film Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, is a heavily fictionalized dramatization of Hypatia's final years. The film, which was intended to criticize contemporary Christian fundamentalism, has had wide-ranging impact on the popular conception of Hypatia. It emphasizes Hypatia's astronomical and mechanical studies rather than her philosophy, portraying her as "less Plato than Copernicus", and emphasizes the restrictions imposed on women by the early Christian church, including depictions of Hypatia being sexually assaulted by one of her father's Christian slaves, and of Cyril reading from forbidding women from teaching. The film contains numerous historical inaccuracies: It inflates Hypatia's achievements and incorrectly portrays her as finding a proof of Aristarchus of Samos's heliocentric model of the universe, which there is no evidence that Hypatia ever studied. It also contains a scene based on Carl Sagan's Cosmos in which Christians raid the Serapeum and burn all of its scrolls, leaving the building itself largely intact. In reality, the Serapeum probably did not have any scrolls in it at that time, and the building was demolished in 391 AD. The film also implies that Hypatia is an atheist, directly contradictory to the surviving sources, which all portray her as following the teachings of Plotinus that the goal of philosophy was "a mystical union with the divine."

title: Hypatia


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Regional accents of English

Spoken English shows great variation across regions where it is the predominant language. The United Kingdom has a wide variety of accents, and no single "British accent" exists. This article provides an overview of the numerous identifiable variations in pronunciation. Such distinctions usually derive from the phonetic inventory of local dialects, as well as from broader differences in the Standard English of different primary-speaking populations.

Accent is the part of dialect concerning local pronunciation. Vocabulary and grammar are described elsewhere; see the list of dialects of the English language. Secondary English speakers tend to carry over the intonation and phonetics of their mother tongue in English speech. For more details on this, see non-native pronunciations of English.

Primary English speakers show great variability in terms of regional accents. Examples such as Pennsylvania Dutch English are easily identified by key characteristics, but others are more obscure or easily confused. Broad regions can possess subforms. For instance, towns located less than 10 mi from the city of Manchester, such as Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, and Salford each have distinct accents, all of which are grouped together under the broader Lancashire accent. These sub-dialects are very similar to each other, but non-local listeners can identify firm differences. On the other side of the spectrum, Australia has a General Australian accent which remains almost unchanged over thousands of miles.

English accents can differ enough to create room for misunderstandings. For example, the pronunciation of "pearl" in some variants of Scottish English can sound like the entirely unrelated word "petal" to an American. For a summary of the differences between accents, see the International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects.

Overview
English dialects differ greatly in their pronunciation of open vowels. In Received Pronunciation, there are four open back vowels,, but in General American there are only three, , and in most dialects of Canadian English only two,. Which words have which vowel varies between dialects. Words like bath and cloth have the vowels in Received Pronunciation, but  in General American. The table above shows some of these dialectal differences.

Britain and Ireland
Accents and dialects vary widely across Great Britain, Ireland and nearby smaller islands. The UK has the most local accents of any English speaking country. As such, a single "British accent" does not exist. Someone could be said to have an English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish accent, although these all have many different sub-types.

Southern England
There are considerable variations within the accents of English across England, one of the most obvious being the trap–bath split of the southern half of the country.

Two main sets of accents are spoken in the West Country, namely Cornish and West Country, spoken primarily in the counties of Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Bristol, Dorset (not as common in Dorset), and Wiltshire (again, less common in eastern Wiltshire). A range of variations can be heard within different parts of the West Country: the Bristolian dialect is distinctive from the accent heard in Gloucestershire (especially south of Cheltenham), for example.

The Cornish accent has an east–west variation with the East of the county having influences from West country English and the West of the county having direct influences from the Cornish language.

There is great variation within Greater London, with various accents such as Cockney, Estuary English, Multicultural London English and Received Pronunciation being found all throughout the region and the Home Counties.

Other accents are those of
 * the East Midlands (Derby, Leicester and Rutland, Lincoln, Northampton, and Nottingham),
 * East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire)
 * the Home Counties (typically Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Hampshire). The Essex accent has an east–west variation with the county's west having Estuary English speech features and the county's east having the traditional Essaxon/East Anglian features.
 * A range of accents are spoken in the West Midlands (in the major towns and conurbations (The Black Country, Birmingham, Coventry, Stoke-on-Trent (considered by many to have tones of scouse) and Wolverhampton) and in rural areas (such as in Herefordshire and south Worcestershire).

In February 2019, The New York Times published a quiz that maps the geographical differences between British and Irish dialects.

Northern England
The accents of Northern England have a range of regional variations.

Cumbria has regional variants in Western Cumbria (Workington), Southern Cumbria (Barrow-in-Furness) and Carlisle.

Modern Northumbrian has local variants in Northern Northumberland (Berwick-upon-Tweed), Eastern Northumberland (Ashington) and Newcastle, Sunderland and Mid-County Durham and Southern County Durham. A specialist dialect called Pitmatic is within this group, found across the region. It includes terms specific to coal mining.

Yorkshire is distinctive, having regional variants around Leeds, Bradford, Hull, Middlesbrough, Sheffield, and York. Although many Yorkshire accents sound similar, accents in areas around Hull and Middlesbrough are markedly different. Due to this, the Middlesbrough accent is sometimes grouped with Modern Northumbrian accents being a mid-way between the two regions.

The Hull accent's rhythm is more like that of northern Lincolnshire than that of the rural East Riding, perhaps due to migration from Lincolnshire to the city during its industrial growth. One feature that it shares with the surrounding rural area is that an /aɪ/ sound in the middle of a word often becomes an /ɑː/: for example, "five" may sound like "fahve", "time" like "tahme".

Historic Lancashire, with regional variants in Bolton, Burnley, Blackburn, Manchester, Preston, Blackpool, Liverpool and Wigan. Many of the Lancashire accents may sound similar to outsiders, with the exception of Manchester and Wigan, where an older dialect has been maintained.

The Liverpool accent, known as Scouse, is an exception to the Lancashire regional variant of English. It has spread to some of the surrounding towns. Before the 1840s, Liverpool's accent was similar to others in Lancashire, though with some distinct features due to the city's proximity to Wales. The city's population of around 60,000 was swelled in the 1840s by the arrival of around 300,000 Irish refugees escaping the Great Famine, as Liverpool was England's main Atlantic port and a popular departure point for people leaving for a new life in the United States. While many of the Irish refugees moved away, a vast number remained in Liverpool and permanently influenced the local accent.

Scotland
The regional accents of Scottish English generally draw on the phoneme inventory of the dialects of Modern Scots, a language spoken by around 30% of the Scottish population with characteristic vowel realisations due to the Scottish vowel length rule. Highland English accents are more strongly influenced by Scottish Gaelic than other forms of Scottish English.

Wales
The accents of English in Wales are strongly influenced by the phonology of the Welsh language, which more than 20% of the population of Wales speak as their first or second language. The North Wales accent is distinct from South Wales. North East Wales is influenced by Scouse and Cheshire accents. South East Wales accents are influenced by West Country accents. The Wenglish of the South Wales Valleys shows a deep cross-fertilisation between the two.

The Cardiff dialect and accent is quite distinctive from that of the South Wales Valleys, primarily:
 * Rounding of the second element of to
 * here pronounced  or  in broader accents
 * A closer pronunciation of as in love and other
 * is widely realised as, giving a pronunciation of Cardiff as

Isle of Man
Manx English has its own distinctive accent, influenced to some extent by the Lancashire dialect and to a lesser extent by some variant of Irish English.

Ireland
Ireland has several main groups of accents, including (1) the accents of Ulster, with a strong influence from Scotland as well as the underlying Gaelic linguistic stratum, which in that province approaches the Gaelic of Scotland, (2) those of Dublin and surrounding areas on the east coast where English has been spoken since the earliest period of colonisation from Britain, and (3) the various accents of west, midlands and south.

Ulster
The Ulster accent has two main sub accents, namely Mid Ulster English and Ulster Scots. The language is spoken throughout the nine counties of Ulster, and in some northern areas of bordering counties such as Louth and Leitrim. It bears many similarities to Scottish English through influence from the Ulster varieties of Scots. Some characteristics of the Ulster accent include:

 * As in Scotland, the vowels and  are merged, so that look and Luke are homophonous. The vowel is a high central rounded vowel,.
 * The diphthong is pronounced approximately, but wide variation exists, especially between social classes in Belfast
 * In Belfast, is a monophthong in open syllables (e.g. day ) but an ingliding diphthong in closed syllables (e.g. daze ). But the monophthong remains when inflectional endings are added, thus daze contrasts with days.
 * The alveolar stops become dental before, e.g. tree and spider
 * often undergoes flapping to before an unstressed syllable, e.g. eighty

Connacht, Leinster, and Munster
The accent of these three provinces fluctuates greatly from the flat tone of the midlands counties of Laois, Kildare, and Offaly, the perceived sing-song of Cork and Kerry, to the soft accents of Mayo and Galway.

Historically, the Dublin City and county area, parts of Wicklow and Louth, came under heavy exclusive influence from the first English settlements, known as The Pale. It remained until Independence from Britain as the biggest concentration of English influence in the whole island.

Some Cork accents have a unique lyrical intonation. Every sentence typically ends in the trademark elongated tail-off on the last word. In Cork heavier emphasis yet is put on the brrr sound to the letter R. This is usually the dialect in northern parts of Cork City.

Similar to the Cork accent but without the same intonation, Kerry puts even heavier emphasis on the brrr sound to the letter R. For example: the word Forty. Throughout the south this word is pronounced whereby the r exhibits the typified Irish brrr. In Kerry, especially in rural areas, the roll on the r is enforced with vibrations from the tongue, not unlike Scottish here.

"Are you?" becomes a co-joined "A-rrou?" single tongue flutter, esp. in rural areas. This extra emphasis on R is also seen in varying measures through parts of West Limerick and West Cork in closer proximity to Kerry.

Another feature in the Kerry accent is the S before the consonant. True to its Gaelic origins in a manner similar to parts of Connacht "s" maintains the shh sound as in shop or sheep. The word Start becomes "Shtart". Stop becomes Shtop.

Irish Travellers
Irish Travellers have a very distinct accent closely related to a rural Hiberno-English, particularly the English of south-eastern Ireland. Many Irish Travellers who were born in parts of Dublin or Britain have the accent in spite of it being strikingly different from the local accents in those regions. They have their own language, Shelta, which strongly links in with their dialect/accent of English.

North America
North American English is a collective term for the dialects of the United States and Canada. It does not include the varieties of Caribbean English spoken in the West Indies.

 * Rhoticity: Most North American English accents differ from Received Pronunciation and some other British dialects by being rhotic. The rhotic consonant is pronounced before consonants and at the end of syllables, and the r-colored vowel  is used as a syllable nucleus. For example, while the words hard and singer would be pronounced  and  in Received Pronunciation, they would be pronounced  and  in General American.  Exceptions are certain traditional accents found in eastern New England, New York City, and the Southern United States, plus African-American English.
 * Mergers before : R-coloring has led to some vowel mergers before historic that do not happen in most other native dialects. In many North American accents, Mary, merry and marry sound the same (Mary–marry–merry merger), but they have the vowels, , , respectively, in RP. Similarly, nearer rhymes with mirror (mirror–nearer merger), though the two have different vowels in RP:  and . Other mergers before  occur in various North American dialects.
 * Mergers of the low back vowels: Other North American mergers that are absent in Received Pronunciation are the merger of the vowels of caught and cot ( and in RP) in many accents, and the merger of father (RP ) and bother (RP ) in almost all.
 * Flat a: Most North American accents lack the so-called trap–bath split found in Southern England: Words like ask, answer, grass, bath, staff, dance are pronounced with the short-a of trap, not with the broad A  of father heard in Southern England as well as in most of the Southern hemisphere. In North America, the vowel of father has merged with that of lot and bother, see above.  Related to the trap–bath split, North American dialects have a feature known as /æ/ tensing.  This results in /æ/ in some environments, particularly nasals to be raised and even diphthongized, typically transcribed as .  Thus, answer is typically pronounced as  rather than.
 * Flapping of and : In North American English,  and  both become the alveolar flap  after a stressed syllable and between vowels or syllabic consonants, making the words latter and ladder homophones, either as  or.

The United States does not have a concrete 'standard' accent in the same way that Britain has Received Pronunciation. A form of speech known to linguists as General American is perceived by many Americans to be "accent-less", meaning a person who speaks in such a manner does not appear to be from anywhere in particular. The region of the United States that most resembles this, is the central Midwest, specifically eastern Nebraska, including Omaha and Lincoln, southern and central Iowa, including Des Moines, parts of Missouri, Indiana, Ohio and western Illinois, including Peoria and the Quad Cities, but not the Chicago area.

Canada
Three major dialect areas can be found in Canada: Western/Central Canada, the Maritimes, and Newfoundland.

The phonology of West/Central Canadian English, also called General Canadian, is broadly similar to that of the Western US, except for the following features: The pronunciation of certain words shows a British influence. For instance, shone is ; been is often ; lieutenant is ; process can be ; etc.
 * The diphthongs and  are raised to approximately  and  before voiceless consonants. For example, the vowel sound of out  is different from that of loud . This feature is known as Canadian raising. The  is even more raised in Atlantic Canada, closer to.
 * The short a of bat is more open than almost everywhere else in North America . The other front lax vowels and, too, can be lowered and/or retracted. This phenomenon has been labelled the Canadian Shift.

Words like drama, pajamas/pyjamas, pasta tend to have rather than ~. Words like sorrow, Florida, orange have rather than ; therefore, sorry rhymes with story rather than with starry.

West Indies and Bermuda
For discussion, see:
 * Bahamian English
 * Barbadian English
 * Bequia English
 * Bermudian English
 * Caribbean English
 * Jamaican English
 * Saban English
 * Trinidadian English

Australia
Australian English is relatively homogeneous when compared to British and American English. There is some regional variation between the states, particularly in regard to South Australia, Victoria, Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Three main varieties of Australian English are spoken according to linguists: Broad Australian, General Australian and Cultivated Australian. They are part of a continuum, reflecting variations in accent. They can, but do not always reflect the social class, education and urban or rural background of the speaker.

 * Australian Aboriginal English refers to the various varieties of the English language used by Indigenous Australians. These varieties, which developed differently in different parts of Australia, vary along a continuum, from forms close to General Australian to more nonstandard forms. There are distinctive features of accent, grammar, words and meanings, as well as language use.
 * The furthest extent of the Aboriginal dialect is Australian Kriol language, which is not mutually intelligible with General Australian English.
 * On the Torres Strait Islands, a distinctive dialect known as Torres Strait English is spoken.
 * In Australian English, pronunciations vary regionally according to the type of vowel that occurs before the sounds, , , , and . In words like "chance", "plant", "branch", "sample" and "demand", the vast majority of Australians use the short /æ/ vowel from the word "cat". In South Australian English there is a high proportion of people who use the broad /aː/ vowel from the word "cart" in these words.
 * Centring diphthongs, which are the vowels that occur in words like ear, beard and air, sheer. In Western Australian English there is a tendency for centring diphthongs to be pronounced as full diphthongs. Those in the eastern states will tend to pronounce "fear" and "sheer" without any jaw movement, while the westerners would pronounce them like "fia" and "shia", respectively which slightly resembles South African English but in a dialect different from New Zealand English.

New Zealand
The New Zealand accent is most similar to Australian accents, particularly those of Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia, but is distinguished from these accents by the presence of three "clipped" vowels, slightly resembling South African English. Phonetically, these are centralised or raised versions of the short "i", "e" and "a" vowels, which in New Zealand are close to, and  respectively rather than ,  and. New Zealand pronunciations are often popularly represented outside New Zealand by writing "fish and chips" as "fush and chups", "yes" as "yiss", "sixty-six" as "suxty-sux".

Scottish English influence is most evident in the southern regions of New Zealand, notably in Dunedin. Another difference between New Zealand and Australian English is the length of the vowel in words such as "dog", and "job" which are longer than in Australian English, which shares the short and staccato pronunciation shared with British English. There is a tendency in New Zealand English, found in some but not all Australian English, to add a schwa between some grouped consonants in words, such that — for example — "shown" and "thrown" may be pronounced "showun" and "throwun".

Geographical variations appear slight, and mainly confined to individual special local words. One group of speakers hold a recognised place as "talking differently": the regions of Otago and especially Southland, both in the south of the South Island, harbour a "Celtic fringe" of people speaking with what is known as the "Southland burr" in which R is pronounced with a soft burr, particularly in words that rhyme with 'nurse'. The area formed a traditional repository of immigration from Scotland.

Some sections of the main urban areas of Auckland and Wellington show a stronger influence of Māori and Pacific island (e.g., Samoan) pronunciations and speech patterns than most of the country.

The trilled 'r' is used by some Māori, who may pronounce 't' and 'k' sounds without aspiration, striking other English speakers as similar to 'd' and 'g'. This is also encountered in South African English, especially among Afrikaans speakers.

Norfolk Island and Pitcairn
The English spoken in the isolated Pacific islands of Norfolk and Pitcairn shows evidence of the islands' long isolation from the world. In the case of Pitcairn, the local creole, Pitkern, shows strong evidence of its rural English 19th century origins, with an accent which has traces of both the English southwest and Geordie. The Norfolk Island equivalent, Norfuk, was greatly influenced in its development by Pitkern.

The accents heard in the islands when English is used are similarly influenced but in a much milder way. In the case of Norfolk Island, Australian English is the primary influence, producing an accent which is like a softened version of an Australian accent. The Pitcairn accent is for the most part largely indistinguishable from the New Zealand accent.

Falkland Islands
The Falkland Islands have a large non-native born population, mainly from Britain, but also from Saint Helena. In rural areas, the Falkland accent tends to be stronger. The accent has resemblances to both Australia-NZ English, and that of Norfolk in England, and contains a number of Spanish loanwords.

Saint Helena
"Saints", as Saint Helenan islanders are called, have a variety of different influences on their accent. To outsiders, the accent has resemblances to the accents of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

"Saint" is not just a different pronunciation of English, it also has its own distinct words. So 'bite' means spicy, as in full of chillies; 'us' is used instead of 'we' ('us has been shopping'); and 'done' is used to generate a past tense, hence 'I done gorn fishing' ('I have been fishing').

Television is a reasonably recent arrival there, and is only just beginning to have an effect. American terms are becoming more common, e.g. 'chips' for crisps.

South Africa
South Africa has 11 official languages, one of which is English. Accents vary significantly between ethnic and language groups. Home-language English speakers, Black, White, Indian and Coloured, in South Africa have an accent that generally resembles British Received Pronunciation, modified with varying degrees of Germanic inflection due to Afrikaans.

The Coloured community is generally bilingual. English accents are strongly influenced by primary mother-tongue, Afrikaans or English. A range of accents can be seen, with the majority of Coloureds showing a strong Afrikaans inflection. Similarly, Afrikaners and Cape Coloureds, both descendant of mainly Dutch settlers, tend to pronounce English phonemes with a strong Afrikaans inflection. The English accents of both related groups are significantly different and easily distinguishable, primarily because of prevalent code-switching among the majority of Coloured English speakers, particularly in the Western Cape of South Africa. The range of accents found among English-speaking Coloureds, from the distinctive "Cape Flats or Coloured English" to the standard "colloquial" South African English accent, are of special interest. Geography and education levels play major roles therein.

Black Africans generally speak English as a second language. Accent is strongly influenced by mother-tongue, particularly Bantu languages. Urban middle-class Black Africans have developed an English accent, with similar inflection as first-language English speakers. Within this ethnic group, variations exist: most Nguni (Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi and Ndebele) speakers have a distinct accent, with the pronunciation of words like 'the' and 'that' as would 'devil' and 'dust', respectively, and words like 'rice' as 'lice'.

This may be as a result of the inadequacy of 'r' in the languages. Sotho (Tswana, Northern Sotho and Southern Sotho) speakers have a similar accent, with slight variations. Tsonga and Venda speakers have very similar accents with far less intonation than Ngunis and Sothos. Some Black speakers have no distinction between the 'i' in determine and the one in decline, pronouncing it similarly to the one in 'mine'.

Black, Indian and Coloured students educated in former Model C schools or at formerly White tertiary institutions will generally adopt a similar accent to their White English-home-language speaking classmates. Code-switching and the "Cape Flats" accent are becoming popular among White learners in public schools within Cape Town.

South African accents vary between major cities, particularly Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, and provinces (regions). Accent variation is observed within respective cities—for instance, Johannesburg, where the northern suburbs (Parkview, Parkwood, Parktown North, Saxonwold, etc.) tend to be less strongly influenced by Afrikaans. These suburbs are more affluent and populated by individuals with tertiary education and higher incomes.

The accents of native English speakers from the southern suburbs (Rosettenville, Turffontein, etc.) tend to be more strongly influenced by Afrikaans. These suburbs are populated by tradesmen and factory workers, with lower incomes. The extent of Afrikaans influence is explained by the fact that Afrikaans urbanisation would historically have been from failed marginal farms or failing economies in rural towns, into the southern and western suburbs of Johannesburg.

The western suburbs of Johannesburg (Newlands, Triomf, which has now reverted to its old name Sophiatown, Westdene, etc.) are predominantly Afrikaans speaking. In a similar fashion, people from predominantly or traditionally Jewish areas in the Johannesburg area (such as Sandton, Linksfield or Victory Park) may have accents influenced by Yiddish or Hebrew ancestry.

South African English accent, across the spectrum, is non-rhotic.

Examples of South African accents (obtained from http://accent.gmu.edu)
 * Native English: Male (Cape Town, South Africa)
 * Native English: Female (Cape Town, South Africa)
 * Native English: Male (Port Elizabeth, South Africa)
 * Native English: Male (Nigel, South Africa)
 * Afrikaans (Primary): Female (Pretoria, South Africa)
 * Afrikaans (Primary): Male (Pretoria, South Africa)
 * Afrikaans (Primary): Male (Pretoria, South Africa)
 * Northern Sotho (Primary): Female (Polokwane, South Africa)

Additional samples of South African accents and dialects can be found at http://web.ku.edu/~idea/africa/southafrica/southafrica.htm

Regardless of regional and ethnic differences (in accents), South African English accent is sometimes confused with Australian (or New Zealand) English by British and American English speakers.

Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, native English speakers, mainly the White and Coloured minority, have a similar speech pattern to that of South Africa. Those with high degrees of Germanic inflection pronounce 'Zimbabwe' as zim-bah-bwi, as opposed to the African pronunciation zeem-bah-bweh.

Zimbwabwean accents vastly vary, with some Black Africans sounding British while others will have a much stronger accent influenced by their mother tongues. Usually this distinction is brought about by where speakers grew up and the school attended. For example, most people that grew up in and around Harare have a British sounding accent, while those in the rural areas have a more "pidgin-english" sort of accent.

Example of a Zimbabwean English accent (obtained from http://accent.gmu.edu)
 * Shona (Primary): Female (Bulawayo, Zimbabwe)

Namibia
Namibian English tends to be strongly influenced by South African English. Most Namibians who grew up in and around the capital city Windhoek have developed an English accent. Those in the rural areas have an accent strongly influenced by their mother tongue, particularly Bantu languages.

Nigeria
Nigerian English varies by constituent units. The accents are influenced by the various mother tongues of the Nigerian constituent units.

India and South Asia
A number of distinct dialects of English are spoken in South Asia. There are many languages spoken in South Asia like Nepali, Hindi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Marathi, Odia, Maithili, Malayalam, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Tulu, Urdu and many more, creating a variety of accents of English. Accents originating in this part of the world tend to display several distinctive features, including:
 * syllable-timing, in which a roughly equal time is allocated to each syllable. Akin to the English of Singapore and Malaysia. Elsewhere, English speech timing is based predominantly on stress;
 * "sing-song" pitch, somewhat reminiscent of those of Welsh English.
 * retroflexion of "t" and "d"

Philippines
Philippine English employs a rhotic accent that originated from the time when it was first introduced by the Americans during the colonization period in an attempt to replace Spanish as the dominant political language. As there are no /f/ or /v/ sounds in most native languages in the Philippines, [p] is used as an alternative to /f/ as [b] is to /v/. The words "fifty" and "five" are often pronounced as "pipty" and "pibe" by many Filipinos. Similarly, /θ/ is often changed to [t] and /ð/ to [d].

"Three" becomes /tri/ while "that" becomes /dat/. This feature is consistent with many other Malayo-Polynesian languages. /z/ is often devoiced to [s], whereas [ʒ] is often devoiced to [ʃ] or affricated to [dʒ], so words like "zoo", "measure", and "beige" may be pronounced [su], [ˈmɛʃoɾ], and [beɪdʒ].

Apart from the frequent inability to pronounce certain fricatives (e.g., [f], [v], [θ], [ð], [z], [ʒ]), in reality, there is no single Philippine English accent. This is because native languages influence spoken English in different ways throughout the archipelago. For instance, those from Visayas usually interchange the sounds /e/ and /i/ as well as /o/ and /u/ because the distinction between those phonemes is not very pronounced in Visayan languages.

People from the northern Philippines may pronounce /r/ as a strong trill instead of a tap, which is more commonly used in the rest of the Philippines, as the trill is a feature of the Ilocano language. Ilocano people generally pronounce the schwa sound /ə/ better than other Filipinos, because they use a similar sound in their native language that is missing from many other Philippine languages.

Hong Kong
The accent of English spoken in Hong Kong follows mainly British, with rather strong influence from Cantonese on the pronunciations of a few consonants and vowels, and sentence grammar and structure.

Malaysia
Malay is the lingua franca of Malaysia, a federation of former British colonies and similar dependencies. English is a foreign language with no official status, but it is commonly learnt as a second or third language.

The Malaysian accent appears to be a melding of British, Chinese, Tamil and Malay influences.

Many Malaysians adopt different accents and usages depending on the situation. For example, an office worker may speak with less colloquialism and with a more British accent on the job than with friends or while out shopping.

 * syllable-timing, where speech is timed according to syllable, akin to the English of the Indian Subcontinent. Elsewhere, speech is usually timed to stress.
 * A quick, staccato style, with "puncturing" syllables and well-defined, drawn out tones.
 * Non-rhoticity, like most varieties of English language in England. Hence caught and court are homophonous as (in actuality,  or ); can't rhymes with aren't, etc.
 * The "ay" and "ow" sounds in raid and road ( and respectively) are pronounced as monophthongs, i.e. with no "glide":  and.
 * is pronounced as [t] and as [d]; hence, thin is  and then is.
 * Depending on how colloquial the situation is: many discourse particles, or words inserted at the end of sentences that indicate the role of the sentence in discourse and the mood it conveys, like "lah", "leh", "mah", "hor", etc.

Singapore
Singapore is effectively a multilingual nation. The Singapore government recognises four official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, and Tamil.

Students in primary and secondary schools learning English as the language of instruction also learn a second language called their "Mother Tongue" by the Ministry of Education, where they are taught Mandarin Chinese, Malay or Tamil. A main point to note is while "Mother Tongue" generally refers to the first language (L1) overseas, in Singapore, it is used by the Ministry of Education to denote the traditional language of one's ethnic group, which sometimes can be their second language (L2).

There are two main types of English spoken in Singapore – Standard Singapore English and Singlish. Singlish is more widely spoken than standard English. It has a very distinctive tone and sentence structure which are both strongly influenced by Malay and the many varieties of Chinese spoken in the city.

A 2005 census showed that around 30% of Singaporeans speak English as their main language at home.

There are many foreigners working in Singapore. 36% of the population in Singapore are foreigners, and foreigners make up 50% of the service sector. Therefore, it is very common to encounter service staff who are not fluent in English. Most of these staff speak Mandarin Chinese. Those who do not speak Mandarin Chinese tend to speak either broken English or Singlish, which they have learnt from the locals.

Antarctica
Phonetic change in the English spoken at a base in Antarctica has been registered. This has been referred to as the start of a new accent called Antarctic English.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Regional accents of English


text:
Talk:Carl Sagan

Education section
He attended the University of Chicago because, despite his excellent high school grades, it was one of the very few colleges he had applied to that would consider accepting a 16-year-old.

Brit writes - is the University of Chicago considered second-rate? I have no idea, but that section in the article is implying it. Perhaps the University of Chicago is not as good as universities like Harvard and Princeton, in the same way that Oxford or Cambridge in UK are in some sense better than other UK universities. But is the reader of this article just supposed to know that? Charliepenandink (talk) 00:23, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Posthumous recognition
'The 1997 film Contact'' was based on the only novel Sagan wrote and finished after his death. It ends with the dedication "For Carl." His photo can also be seen in the film.'''

This makes it seem that Sagan continued to write after he died. It seems like there might have been something about who finished the novel that got edited out. Runtape (talk) 23:55, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

 * I am not an experienced editor, but I agree that it does sound a little weird. You can try rewriting it to make it better, preferably after you have read the sources. Hym3242 (talk) 08:09, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Early Life
He later described his family as Reform Jews, the most liberal of Judaism's four main branches.

The idea that Judaism has "four main branches" with Reform being the "most liberal" among these is a very strange claim that either unintentionally misrepresents its source, is a questionable paraphrasing of its source, or is invented by the editor without any source. There is not much agreement among Jews about which denominations constitute the "main branches" of Judaism, but if we accept arguendo that there are four, most would not agree that Reform is the "most liberal" of the four (that would be Recontructionist Judaism; it is not typical for Jews to consider Orthodox Judaism and "ultra-Orthodox" sects or Haredim to be separate branches of the religion).

I went back and checked the closest referenced source, Keay Davidson's Carl Sagan: A Life. The text in the linked edition of Davidson's book reads as follows on p.11 (boldface is mine for emphasis):

'' In a 1991 interview, Sagan recalled that they were Reform Jews, the more liberal wing of Judaism's three main groups (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform). Cari (Sagan Greene), however, says they were Conservative (that is, more conservative than Reform but more liberal than Orthodox).''

One paragraph down, on page 12, is the following text:

''Secularization was in the air. The great rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the originator of Reconstructionist Judaism, a new, fourth branch of Judaism, urged Jews to abandon superstition, to rebuild their lives around ethnic identification rather than ancient folk tales.''

Even if the editor's claim of "four main branches" of Judaism is an acceptable paraphrasing of the meaning of the text on pages 11/12 (that there were three branches, and then the fourth, Reconstructionism, was evolving during Carl Sagan's early life), and even if it's okay to represent the claim in Davidson's text of 3+1 branches of the religion as established fact, the idea that Reform Judaism would be the "most liberal" of the four is one that most Jews, and I suspect most scholars, would disagree with. (Yes, technically Reconstructionist Judaism is considered an offshoot of Conservative Judaism, probably because Mordecai Kaplan was affiliated with a Conservative institution, Jewish Theological Seminary, when he formulated its key elements, but few would place it as less "liberal" than Reform Judaism in terms of its major principles.)

So I'm stumped where the editor got the idea that Reform Judaism is the "most liberal" of the four branches. It seems like either they misread Davidson's discussion here and didn't understand that Davidson is describing the quasi-mainstream view that the new branch of Reconstructionism was more liberal than the Reform movement, or else they injected their own claim here despite it being directly contradicted by the text of the source. Neonwaiters (talk) 08:00, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Carl Sagan


text:
Sebastian Münster

Sebastian Münster (20 January 1488 – 26 May 1552) was a German cartographer and cosmographer. He also was a Christian Hebraist scholar who taught as a professor at the University of Basel. His well-known work, the highly accurate world map, Cosmographia, sold well and went through 24 editions. Its influence was widely spread by a production of woodcuts created of it by a variety of artists.

Life
He was born in Ingelheim, near Mainz, the son of Andreas Münster. His parents and other ancestors were farmers. In 1505, he entered the Franciscan order. Four years later, he entered a monastery where he became a student of Konrad Pelikan for five years. Münster completed his studies at the University of Tübingen in 1518. His graduate adviser was Johannes Stöffler. He left the Franciscans for the Lutheran Church in order to accept an appointment at the Reformed Church-dominated University of Basel in 1529. He had long harboured an interest in Lutheranism, and during the German Peasants' War, as a monk, he had been repeatedly attacked. A professor of Hebrew, and a disciple of Elias Levita, he edited the Hebrew Bible (2 vols. fol., Basel, 1534–1535), accompanied by a Latin translation and a large number of annotations. He was the first German to produce an edition of the Hebrew Bible.

He published more than one Hebrew grammar, and was the first to prepare a Grammatica Chaldaica (Basel, 1527). His lexicographical labours included a Dictionarium Chaldaicum (1527), and a Dictionarium trilingue for Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in 1530.

He released a Mappa Europae (map of Europe) in 1536. In 1537, he published a Rabbinical translation of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew which he had obtained from Spanish Conversos. In 1540 he published a Latin edition of Ptolemy's Geographia with illustrations. The 1550 edition contains cities, portraits, and costumes. These editions, printed in Germany, are the most valued of this work. Other writings that followed are Horologiographia (a treatise on dialling – constructing sundials, Basel, 1531), and Organum Uranicum (a treatise on the planetary motions, 1536). His Cosmographia of 1544 was the earliest description of the world in the German language. It had numerous editions in different languages including Latin, French, Italian, English, and even Czech. The Cosmographia was one of the most successful and popular works of the 16th century. It passed through 24 editions in 100 years. This success was due to the fascinating woodcuts (some by Hans Holbein the Younger, Urs Graf, Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch, and David Kandel), in addition to including the first to introduce "separate maps for each of the four continents known then – America, Africa, Asia and Europe." It was most important in reviving geography in 16th-century Europe. The last German edition was published in 1628, long after his death. Münster was also known as translator of the Hebrew Bible (Hebraica Biblia). His edition was published in two volumes (1546) in Basel. The first volume contains the books from Genesis to 2 Kings, following the order of the Masoretic codices. The second volume contains The Prophets (Major and Minor), The Psalms, Job, Proverb, Daniel, Chronicles, and the Five Scrolls (The Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther).

His Rudimenta Mathematica was published in Basel in 1551.

He died at Basel of the plague in 1552. Münster's tombstone describes him as the Ezra and the Strabo of the German people.

Gallery
Several paintings with oil on canvas, woodcuts and copper etchings depict Sebastian Münster, by Hans Holbein d. J. (Basel, c. 1530), Willem de Haen (1615), as rector of the University of Basel (by Christoph Amberger, um 1547), and on the 100-DM-bill as used 1962 to 1991.

title: Sebastian Münster


text:
Talk:Hypatia

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 04:29, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Conic sections small.png
 * I swapped it out for the corresponding svg image, File:Conic Sections.svg. The fonts are different, but otherwise it looks the same. I don't see the font change or anything else as a good reason to be using the png instead of the svg. So after this swap the deletion discussion should not affect this article. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:20, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

"Jewish-led massacre"
insists on adding to this article a story about an unrelated event in Alexandria in which, according to a Christian propagandist, some Jews massacred some Christians, giving the Christians an excuse to expel the Jews, loot their property, and blame them for their own expulsion. Given that the Jews were uninvolved in Hypatia's teaching or murder, I fail to see the relevance of these events to the article on Hypatia, and Natemup's insertion of this episode gives the appearance to me of trying to find excuses to blame other people than the murderers for Hypatia's murder. But I'm past the limit for reverts to the article, and it appears from past behavior that if I did revert then Natemup would just continue to edit-war to push it in. So instead can we have some discussion on whether this is relevant, please? Per WP:BRD the article should be left in the pre-addition state while discussion goes on but I'm not going to be the one to put it into that state. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:18, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
 * In my view, it seems at best tangential to the subject of Hypatia herself (WP:UNDUE), and loading up additional details that were third-hand stories when the ancient writers set them down seems like a poor way to do history. XOR'easter (talk) 21:44, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

 * I can understand your point, but the entire story (expulsion and all) is being sourced from the ancient "Christian propagandist" in question. Why include only half of his story? It's all relevant to the controversy leading to Hypatia's murder. natemup (talk) 22:07, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Misinformation with regard to reference
the statement on the live page says, "despite the historical fact that the library no longer existed during Hypatia's lifetime.[8]"

If you read the reference it dose not say that. It says, "she was the head of the Platonist school in Alexandria."

The reference does not say what the live page claims it says.

And the idea that the Library of Alexandria no longer existed in the the time of Hypatia is disputed by multiple sources. For example, in the transcript of the TED talk entitled "What really happened to the Library of Alexandria" Elizabeth Cox wrote, "by the end of the 5th century CE, the great library had vanished." This is after the time of Hypatia.

Greek vs Egyptian
User:Ekrepali and a succession of anonymous IP editors insist on replacing "Egyptian" in the lead by "Greek", with sources various academic articles using that term. They have repeatedly made that change and have so far failed to discuss it at all. From all we actually know of Hypatia, she was clearly a person of unknown ethnicity, living in a place that is now Egypt, that was at the time part of the Greek cultural milieu. I imagine that this is what all reputable sources about her mean when calling her "Greek"; less-reputable sources don't give the matter any thought and assume without evidence that she was ethnically Greek. It is reasonable to guess that her ethnicity might have been Greek but we cannot rely on such guesswork here. I have the strong impression that the IP is pushing the ethnically-Greek angle; for instance, by linking the word "Greek" in their preferred version of the lead to an article on people of Greek ethnicity. Can we discuss here what our lead should say about her, and how to accurately and concisely convey that context, rather than (as the IP is doing) pushing a point of view based only on the prevalence of words in sources and not what those words actually mean, and trying to get the edit to stick through sheer stubbornness rather than consensus? I'm not convinced we need to state a nationality here at all, let alone an ethnicity. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:24, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

"despite the historical fact that the library no longer existed during Hypatia's lifetime"?
The article states that "Since the late twentieth century, some portrayals have associated Hypatia's death with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, despite the historical fact that the library no longer existed during Hypatia's lifetime."

It then links to a page of Jonathan Theodore's book, The Modern Cultural Myth of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as a source. However, even in Theodore's own words: "There was no 'Great Library' in the sense of the iconic vast, priceless collection."

The articles current edit seems to imply that there was no Library of Alexandria at all existing during Hypatia's lifetime and that this is an established "fact". But that's not what the source is saying and there's currently no evidence to prove this either way. The source is saying that if the library did exist, then it likely didn't include as immense of a collection as many people presume it did. I.e., it could have existed, but if it did it wasn't "great".

While it's highly probable that the library was no longer in existence at this time, it certainly hasn't been found to be a fact that it didn't.

Even in Wikipedia's own article about the Library of Alexandria, it includes the possibility of the library still standing in 642 AD (227 years after Hypatia's death) in the section which reads: In 642 AD, Alexandria was captured by the Muslim army of Amr ibn al-As. Several later Arabic sources describe the library's destruction by the order of Caliph Omar. Bar-Hebraeus, writing in the thirteenth century, quotes Omar as saying to Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī: "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them."

Again, it's unlikely that the library was still standing during this time (and the article correctly emphasizes the skepticism around the claim) but this does underscore that this is a disputed matter, regardless of how probable or improbable it may seem. TheGutterMonkey (talk) 09:41, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

The image of Hypatia
David Eppstein you reverted my changes on adding a particular image of Hypatia. What do you think of ? It is a depiction of her from a much more reliable artist. I understand, of course, that there are no surviving illustrations of Hypatia in her time, but I generally think a visual representation within a person's biography is beneficial. GuardianH (talk) 09:25, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
 * No, it is not. Sorry, but we've debated this a million times. There is no conceivable value at all in plastering articles with random imaginary images of people, when those images tell us exactly nothing about the subject of the article – the only thing they do is giving readers a fake sense of familiarity with the subject, which is illusionary and, as such, actually harmful. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:23, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
 * It's more than harmful, it's an embarrassment. It tells the readers "we care more about making our articles look decorative than being informative". See WP:PORTRAIT for more on why this kind of image should not be included. —David Eppstein (talk) 14:38, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Original sources are missing
Perhaps I am blind but I didn't see any list of original sources relating to Hypatia. Where are they? What are all the writers quoted in this article basing their opinions on? van Lustig (talk) 14:17, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Carl Sagan's Cosmos
In all fairness to the late Dr. Carl Sagan, he states in the last chapter ("Who speaks for Earth?") of his book Cosmos, "its last remnants were soon destroyed after Hyptia's death"; this indicates that Dr. Sagan was aware that the Library of Alexandria had largely ceased to exist in "any recognizable form" during the lifetime of Hyptia. Jehannette 04:11, 26 November 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jehannette (talk • contribs)

title: Talk:Hypatia


text:
List of German monarchs

This is a list of monarchs who ruled over East Francia, and the Kingdom of Germany (Regnum Teutonicum), from the division of the Frankish Empire in 843 and the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 until the collapse of the German Empire in 1918:

Holy Roman Empire, 962–1806
The title "King of the Romans", used in the Holy Roman Empire, was, from the coronation of Henry II, considered equivalent to King of Germany. A king was chosen by the German electors and would then proceed to Rome to be crowned emperor by the pope.

Note on titles

 * 1) The Kingdom of Germany started out as the eastern section of the Frankish kingdom, which was split by the Treaty of Verdun in 843. The rulers of the eastern area thus called themselves rex Francorum ("king of the Franks"), rex Francorum orientalium ("king of the East Franks"), and later just rex. A reference to the "Germans", indicating the emergence of a German nation of some sort, did not appear until the eleventh century, when the pope referred to his enemy Henry IV as rex teutonicorum, king of the Germans, in order to brand him as a foreigner. The kings reacted by consistently using the title rex Romanorum, king of the Romans, to emphasize their universal rule even before becoming emperor. This title remained until the end of the Empire in 1806, though after 1508 emperors-elect added "king in Germany" to their titles. (Note: in this and related entries, the kings are called kings of Germany, for clarity's sake)
 * 2) The Kingdom of Germany was never entirely hereditary; rather, ancestry was only one of the factors that determined the succession of kings. During the 10th to 13th centuries, the king was formally elected by the leading nobility in the realm, continuing the Frankish tradition. Gradually the election became the privilege of a group of princes called electors, and the Golden Bull of 1356 formally defined election proceedings.
 * 3) In the Middle Ages, the king did not assume the title "emperor" (from 982 the full title was Imperator Augustus Romanorum, Venerable Emperor of the Romans) until crowned by the pope. Moving to Italy, he was usually first crowned with the Iron Crown of Lombardy, after which he assumed the title of rex Italiae, king of Italy. After this, he would ride on to Rome and be crowned emperor by the pope.
 * 4) Maximilian I was the first king to bear the title of emperor-elect. After his march to Rome for his Imperial coronation failed in 1508, he had himself proclaimed emperor-elect with papal consent. His successor Charles V also assumed that title after his coronation in 1520 until he was crowned emperor by the pope in 1530. From Ferdinand I onwards, all emperors did not get crowned by the Pope anymore. At the same time, chosen successors of the emperors held the title of king of the Romans, if elected by the college of electors during their predecessor's lifetime.

Emperors are listed in bold. Rival kings, anti-kings, and junior co-regents are italicized.

title: List of German monarchs