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Ptolemy: Classical Greek
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Beyond his being considered a member of Alexandria's Greek society, few details of Ptolemy's life are known. Some scholars have assumed that Ptolemy may have been a Greek,[1][4] and others, a Hellenized Egyptian.[2][4][5][6] He was often known in later Arabic sources as "the Upper Egyptian",[7] suggesting that he may have had origins in southern Egypt.[6] Ptolemy is ... known to have used Babylonian astronomical data.[8][9]
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Ptolemy II extended his Hellenizing projects into Palestine by transforming ancient Semitic centers into Greek cities. Rabbah in Jordan [now Amman] was rebuilt as Philadelphia; Akko on the Phoenician coast became Ptolemaïs -- both named in honor of himself. Since Ptolemy II made no overt attempt to Hellenize Jerusalem or Judea... later Jewish tradition portrayed him as a benefactor.
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Born in the upper Macedonian region of Eordaia to the Macedonian nobleman Lagos and Arsinoë, Ptolemy grew up in the royal court at Pella. Little is known about Ptolemy's childhood. In 343 B.C.E. he joined Alexander at Mieza where he studied for three years with the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.).
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Ptolemy was disposed to address it as a philosophical, rather than as a technical, matter. His approach was to expand on his fundamental stance as an Aristotalian naturalist, and develop his astrology from his systemic basis, and that meant that he avoided dealing with a good bit of the practical part of astrology. In fact, some opinions hold that Ptolemy was not a practicing astrologer at all, and that he merely processed part of the Greek astrological tradition such would conform to his synthesis.
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Ptolemy accepted the following order for celestial objects in the solar system: Earth (center), Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. He realized, as had Hipparchus, that the inequalities in the motions of these heavenly bodies necessitated either a system of deferents and epicycles or one of movable eccentrics (both systems devised by Apollonius of Perga, the Greek geometer of the 3rd century BC) in order to account for their movements in terms of uniform circular motion.
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The historical Rosetta stone is a basalt tablet inscribed in 196 BCE with a decree of Ptolemy V of Egypt in two languages (Egyptian and Greek), using three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek). French soldiers found the tablet near the town of Rosetta in northern Egypt, in 1799. French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion used it to derive a key for translating Egyptian hieroglyphics. Since that time, Rosetta has been used as a term for the ability to crack previously indecipherable codes.
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