4min chapter

Earth Ancients cover image

Robert Temple: The Sirius Mystery, Revisited

Earth Ancients

CHAPTER

The Crystal Sun

I decided to focus on ancient optics and wrote a book about that called The Crystal Sun. So ask any archaeologist before I did that, did they have lenses in antiquity? Oh no, no,No, no, no such thing as lens, certainly not. Now the early ones were all carved out of rock crystal but by Roman times they mass produced them out of glass because they had the factories for that. For instance, the notorious Leard lens which was found is an Assyrian one. I think that was about 800 BC, a thousand BC, clearly recent and it was carved of crystal. It was able to prove that it was a card for a very specific case of astigmat

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