Niëllo

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Chewy
Textkit Neophyte
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Jun 08, 2010 7:50 am

Niëllo

Post by Chewy »

Hello everyone,

I'm Mira from Holland and I'm in highschool. Hopefully next year I'll be a senior. I am one of the few students at my school who chose Latin & Greek^^
Anyway for my senior year I need do research and write a big report on any subject of choice. So my friend and I chose Latin & Greek and we've been looking for stuff we could do research on.
We thought it would be fun to combine Latin & Greek with Chemistry (e.g. the make-up or medicine they used) Eventually we found out about this metal alloy 'Niëllo'. But the problem is we can't find many primary sources apart from Natura Historia by Plinius.
So if you know anything more about Niëllo and authors that wrote about it or ANY other original suggestions of subjects we can write a report on( am afraid there isn't much to write about niëllo) , please let me know!

quendidil
Textkit Member
Posts: 197
Joined: Wed Oct 18, 2006 11:39 am

Re: Niëllo

Post by quendidil »

I don't think there are many original sources in Latin regarding this but there are tons of archaeological discoveries since the Egyptians about Niello.

Some other topics you could write about involving both the Classical languages and science are automata and other machines (c.f. Vitruvius and Heron of Alexandria) and ancient biology (in particular Galen; if you are interested in this, I recommend the book "Galen on the Brain").

This may be way beyond the scope of a high school project but tracing the history of magic and occultism from the Greek Magical Papyri (Papyri Graecae Magicae) to the Latin grimoires of the Middle Ages would be very interesting in my opinion. A lot of factors could be considered such as the influence of the Judaic religions at the various stages and the pagan influence.

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