• DOI:10.1086/368425
• Corpus ID: 144492131

A Note on a Tenth Century Graph

@article{Funkhouser1936ANO,
  title={A Note on a Tenth Century Graph},
  author={H. Gray Funkhouser},
  journal={Osiris},
  year={1936},
  volume={1},
  pages={260 - 262}
}

• H. Funkhouser
• Published 1 January 1936
• Physics
• Osiris

The graph given here in facsimile is of significance in the history of graphic methods in that it appears to be the oldest extant example of an attempt to represent changeable values graphically which in appearance closely resembles modern practice. The distinguishing feature is the use of a grid as a background for the drawing of the curves. The graph dates from the tenth, possibly eleventh century, and forms a part of a manuscript discovered by SIGMUND GiUNTHER in I877 (I). The manuscript is the property of the Bayerische Staats-Bibliothek in Munich and bears the inscription Macrobius Boetius in Isagog. Saec. X (2). The main body of the text contains the two books of the commentary of MACROBIUS (3) on CICERO's In Somnium Scipionis in which MACROBIUS reviews the status of the physics and astronomy of his day. There is an appendix, De cursu per zodiacum, possibly added by the unknown transcriber of the tenth century, which is a short description of the movement of the planets through the zodiac. The graph is intended as an illustration for this compendium. The whole work seems to have been compiled as a text for use in monastery schools. The graph apparently was meant to represent a plot of the inclinations of the planetary orbits as a function of the time (4). For this purpose the zone of the zodiac was represented on a plane with a horizontal line divided into thirty parts as the time or longitudinal axis. The vertical axis designates the width of