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According to their website,

Visionary art is a journey, an inner journey of interconnectedness, into a world of extraordinary imagination, encompassing and exploring the qualities of light and dark with a universal and personal focus. Utilizing images that run the spectrum of the human condition, elation to desperation. From the heart rises fantastic and astonishing works of art!

Curated by France Garrido, Olga Spiegel and Miguel Tio. The gallery is located at:

Queensborough Community College
QCC Art Gallery CUNY
222-05 56th Ave
Bayside, NY 11364
(718) 631-6396

91 Jaffa St. (at Mashia’h), Jerusalem

Herodotus wrote that the Spartan army awaited the full moon before marching to Martahon to assist the Athenians in their effort to repel the Persian invasion.

Using these full-Moon clues, most modern books about the battle adopt the calculations of scholars who studied the Athenian calendar, identified this full Moon as falling on September 9, 490 BC, and placed the Battle of Marathon on September 12, 490 BC.

In a past article (“The Moon and the Marathon” in Sky & Telescope’s August 2004 issue), we pointed out that the calculation should be done in the Spartan calendar. Our suggested chronology favored the full Moon of August 10, 490 BC, and placed the Battle of Marathon on August 12, 490 BC.

Apparently, most websites then miscalculated the 2,500 anniversary date to 2010:

In the astronomical year numbering system, advocated by the French astronomer Jacques Cassini, the year preceding 1 AD is called the year 0, and years before that are assigned negative numbers.

The Battle of Marathon therefore occurred in the astronomical year –489 (the historical year 490 BC), and the correct arithmetic is –489 + 2500 = 2011.

Olympia, site of the famous Temple of Zeus and original venue of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, was presumably destroyed by repeated tsunamis that travelled considerable distances inland, and not by earthquake and river floods as has been assumed to date.

…”Both the composition and thickness of the sediments we find in Olympia do not go with the hydraulic potential of the Kladeos River and the geomorphological inventory of the valley. It is highly unlikely that this could have been the work of this creek,” states Vött.

Olympia hypothesis: Tsunamis buried the cult site on the Peloponnese

Evans argues that even the clearly epicyclic gearing of the Moon display may model Babylonian arithmetic, not Greek geometry. The amplitude of the variation encoded by the pin-and-slot mechanism is larger than that used by Hipparchus in his eccentric model, he points out, and is closer to the amplitude used in the lunar algorithms of the Babylonians. “Perhaps a mechanic tried to represent the variations in the Moon’s speed according to the Babylonian theory using gears,” he says — and hit upon an epicyclic arrangement.

In other words, epicycles were not a philosophical innovation but a mechanical one. Once Greek astronomers realized how well epicyclic gearing in devices such as the Antikythera mechanism replicated the cyclic variations of celestial bodies, they could have incorporated the concept into their own geometrical models of the cosmos.

Commemorating the 2,500-year anniversary of The Battle of Marathon. Free phone/web-based lectures, reading groups & more

Presented by Professor Paul Cartledge (Chairman of Marathon2500, A.G. Leventis Chair Greek Culture, Cambridge), with lectures by Paul Carteldge, Peter Krentz, Victor Davis Hanson, Dean Karnazes, Thomas Scanlon, Robert Strassler, and John Marincola. Full schedule for remaining lectures can be found here, and podcasts of past lectures can be found here.

The Nike Monument was unveiled in the new Acropolis Museum on Tuesday by Culture and Tourism Minister Pavlos Geroulanos. The Monument was erected in honour of the ancient military commander Callimachus after the Battle of Marathon. Its various surviving pieces have been reassembled for the first time in its true antiquity form.

At the instigation of the Petra National Trust (PNT), conservation experts Stephen Rickerby and Lisa Shekede restored the paintings to life. The work took three years, and was completed only last week. “The paintings were a real mess,” Rickerby said.

He described what has emerged from the blackened layers as “really exceptional and staggeringly beautiful, with an artistic and technical quality that’s quite unlike anything else”.

They lowered a bare light bulb into the hole, and suddenly [Brown University Professor Stephen] Houston saw “an explosion of color in all directions — reds, greens, yellows.” It was a royal tomb filled with organicsHouston says he’d never seen before: pieces of wood, textiles, thin layers of painted stucco, cord.

“When we opened the tomb, I poked my head in and there was still, to my astonishment, a smell of putrification and a chill that went to my bones,” Houston said. “The chamber had been so well sealed, for over 1600 years, that no air and little water had entered.”

Along with artistic riches, the inner chamber contained the remains of an adult male, “likely the founder of a dynasty”, as well as those of six, possibly sacrificial, children.