Earth Ancients

Lying unnoticed in many museums around the world are large numbers of ancient artefacts fashioned out of rock crystal or glass; lenticular in shape, they are habitually described by archaeologists and cataloguers as decorative in purpose; in short, as costume jewellery. To Robert Temple, however, who bolsters his classical and linguistic erudition with expertise in the field of optics, they are obviously and self-evidently lenses. As such, they form the starting point for The Crystal Sun, his wide-ranging and provocative investigation into the existence of an ancient science of optics. There is much to amaze here, not least the sheer volume of evidence that Temple is able to amass (and the seemingly even greater volume to which, for various tiresome reasons, he was unable to gain access). It is this density of proof, and the hardness of the science involved, that tend to dispel suspicions that we are entering Jesus-was-an-astronaut territory.The narrative of Temple's discoveries is cast almost as an intellect