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Hypatia and the Lighthouse of Alexandria - August 2011: Charles Alexander Moffat
The Tragic Philosopher Several years ago I was tasked with writing a biography about the Egyptian-Greek philosopher Hypatia (AD 350 to 370). I determined during that time that there was a shortage of artworks about the famed Egyptian philosopher and added her to a list of historical and mythological female personages I sought to someday paint.
"By all accounts [Hypatia was] stunningly beautiful, dazzlingly brilliant, yet always modest and kind, in an age when women were but chattel, she was history's first female mathematician, as well as the first female astronomer, inventor, and natural philosopher." And yet she was brutally and publicly murdered by a mob of Christian monks seeking to destroy any source of knowledge which was non-Christian.
"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." And thus began the Dark Ages, a thousand years of ignorance.
Sincerely,
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