In the 7th century AD, Europe was in turmoil, digesting the remnants of the Western Roman Empire, while on the East European plain, the Slavs were just beginning to establish cities. It was during this time in Armenia that Anania Shirakatsi was born, a future scholar who, according to legends, could extract gold from water, predict eclipses, and find “magical” plants.
Anania Shirakatsi is considered the father of natural sciences in Armenian tradition. His truly encyclopedic knowledge and unique works for his time span a wide range of subjects, including, among others, arithmetic, astronomy, alchemy, and natural philosophy. He edited the Armenian calendar—a task that for other peoples often required the convening of entire scholarly assemblies and researchers.
The textbook he created on arithmetic is unique in its level for that era. It consists of several parts: theoretical and a set of tables with basic mathematical operations. This is the earliest known work of its kind. Notably, Shirakatsi was the first to use so-called amusing problems—that is, problems based on real, sometimes mundane, situations.
Today they are familiar to every student, but at that time they were a new phenomenon that significantly simplified teaching. His works formed the core of scholarship in these fields published in the Armenian language by that time. It is not surprising that statues of the scholar have been erected in the main public places of Armenia’s capital, Yerevan.
The exact birth date of the future scholar is unknown; he was most likely born between 598 and 610 AD. Anania, who from a young age sought knowledge and understanding of the world, studied at local Armenian schools, possibly at the Dprevank Monastery, where he learned sacred texts, Armenian literature, and foreign languages, particularly Greek.
His thirst and love for knowledge became the purpose of his life. In those distant times, science was inseparable from religion—Christianity, and monasteries were centers of advanced thought. In his autobiography, Anania says that he wanted to study philosophy and mathematics, which the young man considered the mother of all knowledge.
The geography of Anania’s travels is extensive: even the hosts of the TV show “Heads and Tails” could envy him. Shirakatsi studied in Theodosiopolis (today’s Erzurum), Trabzon, Jerusalem, spent three years in Alexandria, some time in Rome, and according to a legendary tradition dedicated to him, even visited Venice, where he taught the local ruler how to extract gold from water (no, not wine)! Afterward, Shirakatsi spent many years living and studying in Constantinople.
After so many years of education, it’s no surprise that Anania Shirakatsi had an impressive reputation as a scholar, given the wide range of topics covered in the surviving works attributed to him. Typically, 29 works are highlighted, including: “Geography,” “Arithmetic,” “On Odd and Even Numbers,” “On Problems and Solutions,” “Astronomy,” “Tables of Lunar Motion,” “On the Rotation of the Heavens,” “Liturgical Calendars,” “Sermons on the Baptism of the Lord,” and, of course, “Cosmography.”
Returning to his homeland in 661 AD, Shirakatsi settled in his native Shirakavan, where he opened a school whose fame soon spread throughout the country. Alongside his pedagogical work, he was engaged in scholarly activities and wrote valuable works.
The dominance of the Christian Church in the world in which he lived, studied, and later taught led to the creation of a vivid blend of theological views, often presented as axioms, without critical analysis. Yet, in these, he very subtly and carefully wove in empirical, natural-science proofs.
For example, on the question of the creation of the world, Shirakatsi followed the Church Fathers in believing that the earth and sky were created by the Lord. At the same time, his concept that “Emergence is the beginning of decay,” formulated in his “Cosmography,” anticipated the idea of entropy by a thousand years.
Following Ptolemy, Shirakatsi considered the Earth the center of the universe. This idea was approved by the Church, but another critical question remained: is the Earth flat or spherical? Contrary to what our contemporaries often hear, people before modern times did not expect that ships of seafarers could fall off the edge of a flat Earth. The notion that it was spherical was known since ancient times: already in 330 BC, Aristotle proved this on a quite modern level.
The problem was that in the 6th century AD, a major Byzantine merchant named Cosmas Indicopleustes challenged this ancient opinion. He wrote the so-called “Christian Topography,” where he attempted to interpret the Old Testament as if the Earth was depicted as flat in it.
In reality, the word used for it in the text is the ancient Hebrew word “chug” – meaning a circle, a sphere. It’s possible, however, that the merchant did not know ancient Hebrew and in the ancient Greek translation, the word “circle” was used, which created the basis for misunderstanding.
It should be understood that Byzantium was then the intellectual center of the world: Islam had not yet developed the major sciences that became characteristic of it from the 8th century AD onwards, Western Europe was in a state of strong barbarization, and had relatively few influential thinkers.
Therefore, the opinion of Cosmas Indicopleustes had some influence on educated people of the 7th century, the time when Anania Shirakatsi lived. Shirakatsi himself, having spent a long time studying in Byzantium, must have had significant courage to present an alternative viewpoint.
Contrary to the rather authoritative opinion of Cosmas Indicopleustes, the scholar asserted that our planet is not a flat disk, akin to a flatbread, but an object of a spherical or, more precisely, an egg-shaped form: “as if the yolk is in the center, the air around it is like the egg white, and the sky encompasses everything, like the shell.”
This judgment might have also been based, in part, on Armenian tradition, since the inhabitants of the Armenian highlands had been observing stars since around the 5th millennium BCE.
This is evidenced by the countless number of astronomical symbols found in the rock carvings of Armenia. For example, on stones near the mountain sources of Ukhtasar and Ishkhanasar, rocks around Lake Sevan, and other places where the Earth, Sun, Moon, planets, comets, stars, constellations, and even the Milky Way are symbolically represented.
It is quite possible that Shirakatsi not only knew about these ancient observatories but also visited them himself. His homeland—the historical-geographical region in the northeastern part of the Armenian highlands, known as Shirak, from which the scholar’s surname originated—was not too far from the “Armenian Stonehenge,” a large complex of Bronze Age megalithic tombs commonly referred to as the Karahunj Observatory. Similar megaliths have been found in numerous places between Lake Sevan and southern Syunik.
Upon a careful reading of his “Cosmography,” it is not difficult to conclude that Shirakatsi diverged from theologians on the question of Earth’s equilibrium as well. According to the Holy Scripture, it is held up by water, or more precisely, the sea:
“And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry ground ‘land,’ and the gathered waters he called ‘seas.'”
However, Anania believed that what prevents the “heavy” planet from falling is a strong wind blowing from below—a hypothesis that would later be called the vortex theory.
Of course, from today’s perspective, this concept is incorrect—but it must be understood that even the most rational analysis could not have clarified precisely what supports the Earth before the discovery of gravitational force.
Shirakatsi advocated for rationalism in the study of nature and criticized superstitious beliefs and astrology. He strongly criticized the Chaldean soothsayers for attempting to link people’s fates, fortunes, and misfortunes to the movement of stars, asserting that a person’s destiny is not predetermined by the star under which they are born. Shirakatsi considered such claims to be delusions and their authors to be fools.
If this astrological theory is correct, if a person’s life is predetermined by the moment of their birth, Shirakatsi wrote, then why do servants strive for a good life when God has predetermined their miserable existence? And if God puts evil into a small, innocent child, then God Himself is evil.
Anania knew and utilized the works of ancient Greek pagan philosophers, even though excessive reliance on them during that period could result in being labeled a heretic and losing one’s hands and feet. He mocked some of their views, particularly the Greek myths that claimed the Milky Way was breast milk spilled by the goddess Hera when she pushed away her suckling child, Heracles.
Armenian myths about the creation of the Milky Way, which Shirakatsi also knew, probably also only made the researcher smile. An ancient Armenian legend tells the story of Vaagn, the god of war, who stole straw from the Assyrian king Barsham in the cold winter and brought it to Armenia so that people could keep warm.
According to this story, the Milky Way came into existence because some of the straw was scattered by Vaagn across the sky. That’s why the Milky Way is called “The Straw-Thief’s Road” in Armenian.
In his “Cosmography,” Shirakatsi explains the nature of our Galaxy: he states that the Milky Way consists of “a multitude of gathered stars, both dim and bright, whose light appears uniform due to unclear visibility.” This viewpoint was not only advanced for the 7th century but also appeared new and progressive a thousand years later.
To understand how revolutionary this idea was at the time, it’s important to remember that the cosmology of that era primarily relied on the works of ancient authors.
The most authoritative among them was Aristotle, who according to his work “Meteorology,” claimed that the Milky Way was not made up of distant stars at all. Instead, he thought it was the result of the combustion of fiery vapors from stars—stars that he believed were located in the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere, below the Moon.
Unfortunately, in “Cosmography,” Shirakatsi does not explain why he considered Aristotle’s authoritative opinion to be incorrect. However, based on logic, one can assume that he was troubled by the unchanging form of the Milky Way over an extended period. Clearly, combustion processes of such scale and stability are highly unrealistic.
By the way, the scientist urged not to be deceived by the small size of the Sun – in reality, it is larger than the Moon; it’s just much farther away. In his “Geometrical Astronomy,” he gave the distance from Earth to the Sun as 30,930,000 stadia or approximately 5.5 million km. Here, of course, Shirakatsi was mistaken, but he correctly believed that the Moon has craters (incidentally, one of them was named after Shirakatsi in 1979).
Again, this idea was significantly ahead of its time: in European science, up until the invention of telescopes, there was no consensus on this matter. The corresponding dark areas on the Moon were explained as seas or simply dark lowlands.
Anania believed that the Earth’s satellite causes tides and reflects sunlight. Although the latter judgment Shirakatsi likely drew from the ideas of Yeznik Koghbatsi, a 5th-century Armenian theologian, who described his understanding of pagan cosmological ideas as follows:
“And the Moon does not have its own light, but rather it comes from the Sun, they [pagans] say. From whichever side the Sun appears, from that same side light begins to emanate toward it. The Moon does not possess its own light…this is false.”
This judgment is also contained in the main Greek source of cosmology – the “Hexameron” by Basil the Great. In Conversation VI “On the Creation of Celestial Bodies,” he states:
“And let no one find it implausible that we claim there is a brilliance of light and that there is a body in which light resides…”
And further in the same conversation:
“And then we can find confirmation in the investigated subject in the changes of the Moon. For when it waxes and wanes, its body is not completely destroyed, but it presents us with phenomena of diminishing and growing by shedding and then reacquiring the light that clothes it.”
However, Anania’s account shows a clear understanding of this phenomenon.
“But our predecessors, who tried to understand it [the Moon], said the following: …it does not have light by nature but gains it from the Sun through participation. Like a mirror placed opposite the Sun [light], it also reflects many rays from itself, just as the mirror does. However, two Church Fathers claimed that the Moon emits its own light, rather than receiving it from the Sun.”
Shirakatsi goes into detail about “lunar eclipses” of the Sun, contrary to the absurd explanations of Chaldean astrologers who linked eclipses to the movements of a celestial dragon that supposedly covers the Sun or the lunar disk with its tail, causing the eclipse.
Shirakatsi explained what happens when the Sun is rotating in the Northern Hemisphere and the Moon is in the Southern Hemisphere (with the Earth falling between them). It blocks the penetration of sunlight to the Moon, causing a lunar eclipse. And when the Moon falls between the Sun and the Earth, it blocks the sunlight from reaching the Earth, causing a solar eclipse.
Shirakatsi’s “Cosmography” often contradicts the Church Fathers; there are indications that the books of the “ignorant” scientist were banned. It got to the point where Shirakatsi was persecuted, his works were forbidden, but in public memory, as often happens, a special image of the Armenian thinker was preserved.
Folk legends about him claim that he found, high in the mountains, the ever-blooming, magical Amaspur flower, which grants wisdom if eaten. However, having traversed the path from the dust of the earth to celestial bodies, unraveling the mysteries of the wisest words and deeds, and untangling all knots, only the knot of death was one that Shirakatsi could not unravel.
The great scientist died around the year 685 AD. It is traditionally believed that Anania was buried in the village of Anavank (now in Turkey), but the tradition likely arose from the name of the village.
The works of Anania Shirakatsi left a deep imprint on medieval Armenian literary tradition, especially in the field of natural sciences. It is difficult to identify subsequent Armenian researchers of natural sciences who did not make use of Shirakatsi’s works.
Author: Alexander Rechkin naked-science.ru
Translation: Vigen Avetisyan
