11 stories from this place.
The Knights Hospitaller had governed Rhodes since 1309. In summer 1522 the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent besieged the island with an army of approximately 100,000 against the Hospitallers' 7,500 defenders. The siege ran six months. The Hospitallers surrendered on negotiated terms in December and were given safe passage to Crete.
Read the story →The same Greek sponge divers who found the [Antikythera mechanism](/articles/antikythera-mechanism) in 1900–1901 brought up a 1.96-metre bronze statue of a young man. He is one of perhaps a dozen complete or near-complete classical Greek bronzes that have survived to the present. He has been in Athens for almost 125 years.
Read the story →Aristarchus of Samos proposed around 270 BC that the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around. The classical and late-antique Greek astronomical mainstream — including Hipparchus and Ptolemy — rejected the proposal on empirical grounds. The work survives only through a single passage in Archimedes.
Read the story →Chares of Lindos was the Rhodian sculptor who built the 33-metre bronze Colossus of Rhodes between approximately 292 and 280 BC. He had been a pupil of Lysippos. Late-antique tradition claims he killed himself when he discovered a substantial computational error in the statue's stress profile. The Colossus stood for 54 years and was knocked down by an earthquake in 226 BC.
Read the story →The Knights Hospitaller of Saint John captured Rhodes in 1309 and held it as a sovereign crusader state until Suleiman the Magnificent's siege of 1522. They built the fortifications that still define the Old Town. They lost the island after a six-month siege that the rest of Christian Europe declined to relieve.
Read the story →Claudius Ptolemy's *Mathēmatikē Syntaxis* — known to Europe as the *Almagest* through its 9th-century Arabic translation — was the single dominant astronomical reference work of the Western world from approximately 150 AD to 1543. Most of its observational content was inherited from Hipparchus of Rhodes three centuries earlier.
Read the story →An earthquake struck Rhodes in approximately 226 BC, knocking down the Colossus, damaging substantial portions of the city walls, and producing widespread Aegean damage. The Hellenistic kings of Egypt, Macedon, Syria, and Pergamon all sent substantial financial and material aid — the first known case of coordinated international disaster diplomacy.
Read the story →When the Knights Hospitaller built the Castle of Saint Peter at Bodrum in the early 15th century, they used the marble of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World — as quarry stone. The Mausoleum had stood for 1,700 years. The castle stands today.
Read the story →Hipparchus of Rhodes catalogued a thousand stars, invented trigonometry, discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and may have built the original of the Antikythera mechanism. Almost none of his writing survives.
Read the story →The Colossus of Rhodes stood for fifty-four years and lay in ruins for nearly nine hundred. A Jewish merchant from Edessa bought the bronze.
Read the story →Sponge divers found a corroded lump of bronze in 1901. It took a hundred and twenty years to admit what it actually was.
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