Livio Catullo Stecchini

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Livio Catullo Stecchini (6 October 1913 – September 1979) was a historian of science, a teaching professor (Harvard PhD), a scholar of ancient weights and measures, (the science of metrology) and of the history of cartography in antiquity.

After eight years of studying Latin and Greek he became a student of Angelo Segre at the University of Freiburg, Germany where he also studied Husserl, and attended the lectures of Heidegger and Oskar Becker. Eventually he focused on the work of Fritz Prinsheim who was dedicated to one topic, the contract of sale in ancient times. Had he known that in the hands of Ken Kitchen the sequence of blessings and curses in ancient contracts was eventually to become one of the most important dating tools of modern archaeology Stecchini might not have focused on the clauses relating to measures. As it happened it was this focus that led Otto Lenel to allow him to read a paper on the length of miles in the Syro-Roman Law Book.

After the Freiburg group was disbanded by Hitler he returned to Italy where he received a doctorate in the field of Roman Law. He became assistant to the chair of history of Roman Law at the University of Rome and a member of the Institute of Roman and Oriental Law of that University where he was influenced by Edoardo Volterra holder of the chair of Oriental Law there.

When he fled from the Fascist regimes of Europe to the United States to register for a doctorate in Ancient History at Harvard, he worked under Werner Jaeger, who suggested that he write his thesis on the concept of akribea or precision in Greek thought. In the end he submitted his thesis on "On the Origin of Money in Greece" and from there went to the study of Greek monetary weights, the operation of Greek mints and the dimensions of Greek Temples. From there he turned to the study of ancient geography and geodesy. His knowledge base was specialized in agrarian measures in cuneiform tablets, rates of money exchange in Greek tablets, and the volume of jars in Egyptian papyri.

[edit] Controversy

Stecchini's work included many controversial elements, and he complained he was ignored by fellow scientists. His defence of Immanuel Velikovsky in the September 1963 issue of American Behavioral Scientist magazine (that issue was republished in 1966 as The Velikovsky Affair) undoubtedly also contributed to this.

His unpublished work on metrology, based on his work on ancient numismatics, ends in conclusions which are rejected by most academics today. His method consists of starting with an assumption, namely that all ancient measures are by definition related. It is an old and intriguing idea, but one for which no proof has been found. Based on numerical analysis of data, he reaches his conclusion (in "A History of Measures"):

In spite of the efforts of the most learned classical scholars and Orientalists and of the best mathematical minds, such as Kepler, Riccioli, Mersenne, Newton, Boscovich, and Laplace, It was thought that the result had been for a good part negative. In truth, they had obtained perfectly correct evaluations from the empirical data, but could not discover the principle that links them.

I have solved the inner rationale of ancient and medieval units of length, and by implication, of all units of measure, by discovering two facts:

a) that there were four fundamental types of foot related as 15:16:17:18,

b) that each of these types existed in two varieties related as the cube root of 24/the cube root of 25.

He does suggest a very intricate theoretical means by which this could have been executed in practical terms, but presents no evidence from archeology or otherwise.

Stecchini's analysis of the geometry and methods for constructing the Great Pyramid were interpreted for a popular audience in Peter Tompkins' Secrets of the Great Pyramid with Stecchini's "Notes of the Relation of Ancient Measures to the Great Pyramid," in an appendix to the book.

[edit] References

• Alfred de Grazia, Ralph E. Juergens, Stecchini L.C. (Eds.) (1978). The Velikovsky Affair - Scientism versus Science. 2ed., Metron Publications, Princeton, New Jersey. ISBN 0-349-10747-5
• Tomkins, Peter, Stecchini Livio Catullo (1971). Secrets of the Great Pyramid. reprint ed. (March 1, 1997), BBS Publishing Corporation, Edison, NJ. ISBN 0-88365-957-3.

[edit] External links

• metrum.org preserves some scattered material, his essay "The Deluge as Metaphor," an essay on the origin of money in Greece, on the relation between Greece and Anatolia in "Gyges and Homer", "A History of Measures", and in "The Key to Ancient Architecture," Stecchini's analytic measurements of the Parthenon, etc.