Hypatia (A.D. 379? - 415)^†

Who was Hypatia?  In the estimation of some, Hypatia was history’s greatest woman.  By all accounts stunningly beautiful, dazzlingly brilliant, yet always modest and kind, in an age when women were but chattel, this remarkable Alexandrian Greek woman was history’s first female mathematician, as well as the first female astronomer, inventor, and natural philosopher.  She was the last keeper of the flame of knowledge in that great Alexandrian University — the Museum — the center of all the world’s learning.  As the daughter of the last head professor of the Museum, she practically grew up in the Great Alexandrian Library, where all the world’s knowledge was kept, for in addition to being a child prodigy, she was a voracious reader.  Already, by the age of womanhood in those days (i.e., twelve), she was considered to have assimilated the sum total of all significant human knowledge.  Books in those days, before the advent of printing, were in the form of hand-written scrolls, each one a priceless original, and when what was left of the Great Alexandrian Library was burned down by the Christians at the command of Christian emperor Theodosius “The Great” in the year 391, the books were all gone.  But Hypatia’s mind still contained the best of what was lost in the flames, and so, throughout the rest of her life, whenever someone was stumped by a problem, there were no more books to turn to — to see if some brilliant ancient Greek hadn’t already solved it — there was only Hypatia to turn to.  By the time her career as lecturing natural philosopher culminated, she was considered an oracle, and citizens and heads of state streamed in from all over the two empires to consult with her on important matters.  Indeed, so great was her renown, that letters from all over the far-flung empires addressed simply “to the Philosopher” would unerringly find their way to her.  Her life’s mission was to preserve the ancient knowledge of the brilliant Greeks, and to preserve their tradition of free-thinking rational thought, but the world around her was in upheaval, and the Christians were consolidating their power, turning the mind of man away from reason, to faith.  Hypatia was the last obstacle to the Church’s goal of world domination, and when the Christian mob under Saint Cyril came to make of her history’s greatest martyr for science — in the most gruesome way imaginable — the scholars left Alexandria in disgust, Alexandria ceased to be the world’s center of learning, the Dark Ages descended upon the world, and the mind of man stagnated for a thousand years.  Her life has all the heroic elements of a Greek tragedy, and if this were all that we knew, her place in history would already be assured, as a great tragic soul, standing alone against the coming darkness.  But this is not all we know.  Recent research suggests that the Christians did not succeed in destroying her life’s works, as was previously believed.  Hypatia did not live in vain.  It is now believed, by those competent to judge such matters, that the very primers of rational thought, Euclid’s the Elements, Ptolemy’s Almagest, and Diophantus’ Arithmetica have come down to us only through the Hypatian recension — that is, through copies made of Hypatia’s own hand-written notes on these masterpieces.  These books bear the very seed of the ancient Greek genius, and when these books were rediscovered, at the end of the Middle Ages, that seed sprouted and a New Age of secularism and rational thought dawned upon the world, a period in history which we today know as The Renaissance, meaning, quite literally, The Re-Birth — of the Classical Age of Greek wisdom.  Today, we are in effect the children of the wise and rational Greeks, not of the ignorant superstitious medievals, in large part because Hypatia preserved and disseminated the seed of Greek wisdom.  Although that seed lay dormant for a thousand years, eventually it sprouted and bore the fruits which produced the Modern Age, and in the end, the great woman triumphed, after all.

^†  History does not record the year of Hypatia’s birth, and all estimates are nothing more than guesses — guesses which invariably reflect the bias of the person making the guess.  Most estimates — with the notable exception of Maria Dzielska’s — have placed the year of Hypatia’s birth in the range from A.D. 370 to 380.  That is to say, most historians before Ms. Dzielska have regarded this to be a plausible range of years for Hypatia’s birth to have fallen in.  In fact, Charles Singer, in his book, A History of Scientific Ideas, specifies with a greater implied precision than any other, the year of Hypatia’s birth.  He gives the year of her birth as A.D. 379 — a figure which was adopted for Khan Amore’s Hypatia, for it best suited the needs of his fiction.  For an in-depth rebuttal of some of Maria Dzielska’s assertions — including a rebuttal of her declaration that Hypatia was an old woman when she died — Click Here.

Free Pictures (Non-Contemporary Artists’ Renditions) of Hypatia:

Click Here for more Free Images of Hypatia and Her World (including Ancient Maps and Wallpapers.)

For More Information:

Click Here to Download a near-DVD-Quality video excerpt of COSMOS in which renowned astronomer Carl Sagan discusses the historic importance of Hypatia.

Click Here to check out Khan Amore’s in-depth point-by-point Rebuttal of Maria Dzielska’s trivialization of the historical Hypatia,

(as well as a rebuttal of her assertion that Hypatia died as an old woman.)

Click Here for an in-depth Time-Line of Hypatia’s Life and Times.

Click Here to check out Khan Amore’s controversial novel about Hypatia.

Interesting Facts About Hypatia:

►      Hypatia was very likely born in her home town of Alexandria, Egypt, in the latter half of the Fourth Century of the Christian Era, but there can be little doubt that she was of Greek descent.  The learned classes of post-Ptolemaic Alexandria were of Greek extraction, and they spoke and wrote in Greek, and it is known with great certainty that Hypatia wrote all of her life works in Greek.  And of course it is hardly necessary to mention that her name, and that of her father, were both Greek.

►    Hypatia’s father, Theon, was the last scholarch of the famed Museum — the ancient world’s center of learning, where the Great Alexandrian Library served as the world’s storehouse of knowledge.  History records that Theon was the last Head professor of that ancient University — and that the Museum was shut down permanently after his tenure — but history also records that after Theon’s death around the year 400, Hypatia followed in her father’s footsteps — even surpassing him — and continued to privately teach mathematics, astronomy, and natural philosophy.

►    Hypatia never married or bore children, although many of her (male) students were madly in love with her, and it is recorded that some even proposed marriage to her.  At the time of her death she was even accused of “bewitching” the Prefect of Alexandria (i.e., the governor, who could have any woman) and this argues strongly in favor of a relatively young age at the time of her death.

►    As perhaps the first woman in history who was able to venture into exclusively male realms (i.e., math, science, and philosophy) and gain independence thereby, Hypatia may be regarded as history’s first “liberated woman,” and, indeed, she is justly venerated to this day by modern-day feminists who have adopted her as their pioneering figurehead.

►    Although it is often dogmatically asserted that Hypatia was a Neo-Platonist (and even Carl Sagan jumped on that bandwagon) there is no mention of any such mystical strain in Hypatia’s thinking in any of the historical sources, and all sources state positively that Hypatia wrote exclusively on scientific, mathematical, and astronomical subjects.  Hypatia was clearly in the scientific Ionian philosophical tradition (like Anaxagoras and Archimedes) rather than in the irrational and mystical “philo-sophistry” tradition of Plotinus (The fountain-head of Neo-Platonism).  For a brief summary and sampling of the Neo-Platonism which Hypatia is now accused of espousing, Click Here.  The more that one learns about Neo-Platonism, the more difficult it is to accept that the brilliant and logical Hypatia could have been an adherent to such mystical mumbo-jumbo.

►     A Misconception Debunked:  Contrary to misconceptions that you may see implied elsewhere on the web, the following is definitely NOT a picture of Hypatia:

This is NOT a picture of Hypatia.

Said to be from er Rubayat, this limewood,

encaustic, gold leaf panel dates back to circa

A.D. 160-170 (250 years before Hypatia.)

 

 

 

►     Frequently-Asked Question:  Was Hypatia really the first female mathematician?

Answer:  Hypatia was the first female mathematician that we know of.  Although girls were not generally sent to school in the ancient Greek culture, the schools of Pythagoras, Plato, and Epicurus were unique in the ancient Greek world, in that they admitted female pupils into their ranks, and these, of course, predated Hypatia.  Of these, the schools of Pythagoras and Plato certainly taught mathematics, and Pythagoras’ wife, Theano, may well have been conversant with this field of study, but there is a difference between being a student of mathematics and being a mathematician.  We can give the name of no other woman before Hypatia who taught mathematics, who wrote commentaries on exclusively mathematical or astronomical subjects, and who even added theorems of her own to the body of mathematical knowledge.  In consideration of these facts, it is clear that Hypatia is indeed the first known female mathematician as well as the first known female astronomer — which also makes her the first known female scientist.

 

 

►     Frequently-Asked Question:  What were Hypatia’s original contributions to mathematics?

Answer: Although Hypatia’s chief impact on history was as a preserver of ancient wisdom, and a martyr for secular free-thinking (whose assassination heralded the beginning of the Dark Ages, and indeed, perhaps helped to trigger this millennium of intellectual stagnation) there is evidence that Hypatia contributed her own original solutions in the fields of Number Theory and Diophantine Analysis.  According to the eminent historian of mathematics, Sir Thomas L. Heath, Hypatia seems to have added some alternative solutions and a number of new problems to Diophantus’ masterpiece, the Arithmetica, and some of these, such as II. 1-7, 17, 18, were admitted into the text and were subsequently taken to be part of Diophantus’ own work [Source: page 14 of Diophantus of Alexandria, by Sir Thomas L. Heath.]  These, then, are believed to be Hypatia’s original contributions to mathematics, but there may well be more that we don’t know of, for Hypatia’s father, Theon — the last head professor of the Great Museum of Alexandria — mentioned that his daughter, Hypatia, had assisted him in his revision of the Almagest of Claudius Ptolemæus, and it is believed that after his death, she revised the body of this great work in its entirety, and this is the version that has come down to us.  Modesty was revered as a virtue, though, in those days, especially among females, and so we should not be surprised that Hypatia did not boast of her accomplishments, especially in an age when people were less likely to take a work seriously if they knew that the originator of that work was a woman.

 

 

►     Frequently-Asked Question:  Was Hypatia really the first female philosopher?

Answer:  Hypatia was the first female Natural Philosopher (the ancient name for what we today call a “scientist”) that we know of.  To be sure, there were, before Hypatia’s time, women which might be called ethical philosophers.  Epicurus’ mistress, Leontium certainly studied Epicurean Rational Hedonism “under” the master, and, although she was a courtesan by profession, she even found non-horizontal time in her busy schedule to write books; but Epicureanism defined philosophy as the art of making life happy, and so these literary works of Leontium were not likely primers on how to reason.  (This isn’t to say that a book on how to be happy isn’t of value in the ascent of man — it’s just in a different field from natural philosophy.)  Also, the founder of the more carnal philosophy of Cyrenaic Hedonism, Aristippus, had a daughter named Arete who taught this carpe diem pleasure-seeking philosophy to her son, who then followed in his grandfather’s footsteps.  But again, the Cyrenaic Hedonists were unabashed sensual hedonists who had more enjoyable things to do than to derive mathematical theorems or write commentaries on abstruse astronomical treatises — every day for them was filled with symposia and feasts, every night an orgy.  This is not to denigrate the ancient Greek Philosophy of Cyrenaic Hedonism — it was actually quite a meritorious school of thought — but again, like Leontium, Arete could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a Natural Philosopher (i.e., that which we today call a “scientist.”)  In the history of Ancient Greek Philosophy, Hypatia was indeed the first known (and, sadly, the last) female Natural Philosopher.

 

 

►     Frequently-Asked Question:  Did Hypatia invent the hydrometer and the astrolabe?

Answer:  This is not known with certainty.  However, According to both Margaret Alic [on page 44 of her book, Hypatia’s Heritage] and Lynn Osen [on page 28 of her book Women in Mathematics] Hypatia is to be credited for both the inventions of the “hydroscope” (a specific-gravity-measuring device known to us today as the hydrometer) and the plane astrolabe (which is in essence a celestial analogue computer, somewhat similar in function to what we today call a planisphere).  According to at least one edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Synesius of Cyrene’s letters to his beloved teacher, Hypatia, give the earliest known historical mentions of both the hydrometer and the astrolabe, and in these letters he was clearly consulting her on their construction, so credit for the discovery of these inventions should at any rate not go to him.  Also, it is known that Hypatia’s father Theon wrote the first historical treatise on the “astrolabium” or plane astrolabe.  Since Hypatia often collaborated with her father, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that the astrolabe may have been invented jointly by this stellar father/daughter team.  At any rate, we know of no one else who knew about hydrometers and astrolabes before Hypatia and Theon, so the priority of these discoveries can go to none other.

 

 

►     Frequently-Asked Question:  Wasn’t the astrolabe already around for centuries before Hypatia’s time?

Answer:  Not as far as we know.  There is some confusion here which we hope we can clear up once and for all.  In a review of Maria Dzielska’s Hypatia of Alexandria appearing on the Barnes and Noble website, John Leonard of The Nation wrote, " ... what [Hypatia]  knew about hydroscopes and astrolabes she probably got from her father, Theon, who got it from Ptolemy ..."  As far as we can ascertain, nobody before Mr. Leonard has yet claimed that Ptolemy knew about hydrometers, and the "astrolabe" of Claudius Ptolemaeus was quite different from the device we know today as the "astrolabe" — the one for which Theon's Treatise on the Little Astrolabe gives history's first description.  This misunderstanding is so persistent that it is perhaps only by seeing both instruments side-by-side, that non-astronomers can appreciate the difference between Claudius Ptolemy's astrolabon and Theon's/Hypatia's astrolabium.  The two instruments are shown, below.  The one on the left is Claudius Ptolemy's armillary astrolabon, and the one on the right is the plane astrolabe or astrolabium which was first described by Theon in his treatise on this device.  Now I ask you, do these two instruments look even remotely like the same device to you?

 

 It shouldn't take a patent examiner to be able to tell that these are not the same invention.

 

 

 

►     Frequently-Asked Question:  When and where was Hypatia born and when and where did she die?

Answer:  History does not record even so much as the year of Hypatia’s birth, much less the date.  Most historians, however, have placed the year of her birth in the decade between A.D. 370 and 380.  Charles Singer, in his book, A History of Scientific Ideas, specifies with a greater implied precision than any other, the year of Hypatia’s birth.  He gives the year of her birth as A.D. 379  (a figure which I adopted for my novel, for it best suited the needs of my fiction.)  Because her father, Theon, apparently lived out his entire life in Alexandria, Egypt, if we were compelled to surmise where Hypatia was born, this magnificent cosmopolis — and center of all the ancient world’s learning — would be our best guess.  Unlike the date of her birth, history does, however, record the place, circumstances, and time-frame of Hypatia’s death: she was brutally assassinated in Lent of the year A.D. 415 by a band of Christian monks and other militant Christians (who were doing Saint Cyril’s bidding, and thus went unpunished for their heinous act).  And just where did Hypatia die?  Hypatia drew her last breath in the Christian Church of Saint Michael (which had previously been known as the Caesarium of Alexandria — in front of which stood the two famed obelisks which were called Cleopatra’s Needles.)  Thus, it seems, Hypatia was born in Alexandria, lived there, worked there, and died there.  Unsurprising, really.  After all, if you were a scholar or philosopher in Hypatia’s time, there was really no place else in the world you would want to be.  Rome had faded to insignificance (it was no longer even a capital) and Athens had long since passed its flame of learning over to Alexandria, making Alexandria the undisputed intellectual capital of the world.  As fate would have it, this “City of the Stargazers” was the place where science, rationality, and free-thinking were to make their last stand before the descent of the Dark Ages, and Hypatia of Alexandria was the very pivot upon which all of history turned.

 

 

►     Frequently-Asked Question:  How did Hypatia die?

Answer:  History’s greatest woman died a horrible, horrible death.  While riding home in her chariot one day, (probably after lecturing at one of the public amphitheatres) history’s only known female Universal Genius was ambushed by a band of Christian fanatics.  She was then publicly stripped naked and dragged in procession through the streets to the church of Saint Michael (formerly known as the Caesarium) by the huge crowd of Christian parishioners, militant Nitrian monks and an outfit of ruffians known as the Parabolani, whose duty it was to enforce Archbishop Cyril’s will.  The stunning savante’s hair was ripped out, and, once in church, Cyril’s Reader, Peter, skinned her alive with sharpened oyster shells (“οστρακις”).  Her bloody, still-quivering skeletal remains were then taken to the dump and burned, as were her books — her life’s work.

 

 

►     Frequently-Asked Question:  Why was Hypatia killed?

Answer:  In a word, the answer is Religion.  The world in Hypatia’s time was in upheaval, and the Christians were consolidating their power, turning the mind of man away from reason, to faith.  Though she was highly revered in her time, Hypatia was not a Christian, and she stood at the epicenter of momentous earth-shaking events.  The non-Christian Greek tradition of free-thinking which Hypatia strove to preserve and disseminate was perceived to be a political threat to the mind-controlling power of the Christian theocrats, and Hypatia came to be regarded as the last obstacle to the Church’s goal of world domination.  Everything not in line with Christian dogma was at the time being systematically eliminated by the Christians in power.   First the Christians destroyed the full collection of books of the Great Library of Alexandria (housed in the Serapeum at the time), then they eliminated publicly-funded secular education, by shutting down the Museum for good, and finally the mob of monks under Saint Cyril came for Hypatia herself, and made of her history’s greatest martyr for science and Reason — in the most gruesome way imaginable.  The conflict which was occurring in Alexandria in Hypatia’s time was clearly the conflict between Church and State — a conflict which the Christians correctly assumed would be resolved when the separation between Church and State was removed.  When an example was made of Hypatia, no non-Christian dared to challenge the authority of the Church (even in secular matters) and the separation between Church and State crumbled and fell, and the Church ruled the world.  The result, of course, was that the mind of man stagnated for a thousand years, for, as history has shown, time and again, Religion stops a thinking mind. When Hypatia — an eminent and beloved woman renowned for her un-Christian wisdom —  was publicly assassinated for standing in the way of Christian political power, this sent a chilling message to anyone who had not yet converted.  Hypatia’s friend, the prefect Orestes, (even though he was baptized a Christian) disappeared after Hypatia's murder and was never heard from again, leaving the Churchmen fully in control of even secular matters, and for the millennium that followed no one ever again dared to say, or write, or even think anything that was not in line with the views of the Churchmen in power.

 

Hypatia’s assassination was very public, as it was intended to send a message, and this butchery — carried out in church — evidently achieved its goal, for the scholars fled Alexandria in shock, fear, and disgust, Alexandria ceased to be the world’s center of learning, the Dark Ages descended upon the world, and — with the Church finally in control of all — the mind of man stagnated for a thousand years.  Hypatia stood alone between the Age of Classical Greek Wisdom and the Dark Ages, and when she was snuffed out, so was the light of Reason, and the darkness of ignorance fell at last across the world.  It was as if she was the very pivot upon which history turned.  That is why Hypatia is regarded by some to be history’s greatest woman….

 

 

 

Hypatia Avatar

showing the Greek

spelling of her name.

In Greek, her name

was pronounced

“ee-pah-TEE-ah.”

 

[ Click Here to Download .PDF Version ]

 

 

 

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