C-287: Fill & Download for Free

Many of the key conceptual breakthroughs of the “Scientific Revolution” (c. 1540–1700 CE) are still in place, basically unaltered, after 400 years or so:Newton’s three laws of motionKepler’s laws of planetary motionGalileo’s equations describing the kinematics of falling bodiesHarvey’s model for the circulation of the bloodSteno’s law of superpositionBut . . . these two (and doubtless other) innovations by ancient Greek scientists beat anything on that list in the longevity sweepstakes:Heliocentrism (Aristarchus of Samos, c. 310–230 BCE)Displacement (Archimedes of Syracuse, c. 287–212 BCE)And, depending on how you want to define “scientific understanding,” the idea that natural phenomena have natural explanations constant across space and time (that they’re not the random act of capricious deities) goes back to Thales of Miletus (c. 624–546 BCE) and thus beats them all.

There is no compelling historical evidence that any ancient Egyptians prior to the Hellenistic Period (c. 323–c. 31 BC) “understood” the concept of heliocentrism. Some authors have proposed extremely speculative arguments that they did, but none of those arguments really hold water.The ancient Egyptians, during the later periods of their history, certainly did realize that the earth was spherical. (As I explain in this previous answer, the fact that the earth is spherical was common knowledge among all educated persons in the Mediterranean world from the late fifth century BC onwards.) Even long after they realized the earth was spherical, however, the Egyptians, like most other ancient peoples, continued to believe that the sun orbited around the earth, not vice versa.That being said, Nicolaus Copernicus was far from the first person to argue in favor of heliocentrism. By the time Copernicus was born in 1473, heliocentrism was already an ancient idea. The first person known to have proposed a fully heliocentric model of the universe is the Greek astronomer Aristarchos of Samos (lived c. 310 – c. 230 BC). Aristarchos’s model, in fact, was virtually identical to the model later proposed by Copernicus.ABOVE: Diagram illustrating Aristarchos’s calculations of the relative sizes and orbits of the moon, earth, and sun from a tenth-century AD Greek manuscriptAristarchos’s model is chiefly known from the description of it by the Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BC) in his treatise The Sand Reckoner. Although Archimedes seems to have favored Aristarchos’s model, it was widely rejected by the Greek academic establishment because Aristarchos failed to provide conclusive evidence to support his hypothesis. Most Greek scholars after Aristarchos continued to accept the traditional geocentric model, which had been supported by Aristotle (lived 384–322 BC) just over a generation prior.Nonetheless, heliocentrism never quite completely died out. It was championed by several astronomers in the Arab world during the Middle Ages. In fact, Copernicus actually relied on and cited the works of several Arab astronomers when writing his treatise De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (“On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”).What makes Copernicus different from all the earlier scholars who had supported heliocentrism, however, was that he provided a decent mathematical model for it based on detailed observations. Copernicus is therefore still significant, because, while he did not come up with the idea of heliocentrism himself, he was the first person to provide a decent mathematical model for it.ABOVE: Portrait from c. 1580 believed to represent Nicolaus Copernicus

In the Classical Attic Greek of the fifth century BC, the word εὕρηκα would have been pronounced /heú̯.rɛː.ka/, but, by the time of Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 – c. 212 BC), the standard Koine pronunciation would been something more like /ˈ(h)ew.re.ka/, since the pronunciation of Greek was starting to gradually shift towards a phonology somewhat more similar to that of Modern Greek.To throw a monkey wrench into this whole paradigm, however, Archimedes himself spoke and wrote in the Doric Greek dialect of his native Syracuse and we do not know much at all about how that dialect was pronounced in the third century BC when Archimedes was alive. In other words, we cannot be sure exactly how Archimedes would have pronounced the word.You are probably best off with either the Classical Attic pronunciation or the Koine pronunciation.