De Macedonum et Asianorum anno solari

De Macedonum et Asianorum anno solari, dissertatio: cum Graecorum astronorum parapegmate, ad Macedonici et Juliani. Anni rationes accommodato - Jacobi Usserii (James Usher), Londini 1648.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Ussher (sometimes spelled Usher, 4 January 1581 – 21 March 1656) was Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656. He was a prolific scholar, who most famously published a chronology that purported to establish the time and date of the creation as the night preceding Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC, according to the proleptic Julian calendar.

Ussher was born in Dublin, Ireland, into a well-to-do Anglo-Irish family. His maternal grandfather, James Stanihurst, had been speaker of the Irish parliament, and his father Arnold Ussher was a clerk in chancery who married Margaret Stanihurst. Ussher's younger, and only surviving, brother, Ambrose, became a distinguished scholar of Arabic and Hebrew. According to his chaplain and biographer, Nicholas Bernard, the elder brother was taught to read by two blind, spinster aunts.

Ussher was a gifted polyglot, entering Dublin Free School and then the newly-founded (1591) Trinity College, Dublin on 9 January 1594, at the age of thirteen (not an unusual age at the time). He had received his Bachelor of Arts degree by 1598, and was a fellow and MA by 1600 (though Bernard claims he did not gain his MA till 1601). In May 1602, he was ordained in the Trinity College Chapel as a deacon in the Protestant, established, Church of Ireland (and possibly priest on the same day) by his uncle Henry Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.

Ussher went on to become Chancellor of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin in 1605 and Prebend of Finglas. He became Professor of Theological Controversies at Trinity College and a Bachelor of Divinity in 1607, Doctor of Divinity in 1612, and then Vice-Chancellor in 1615 and vice-provost in 1616. In 1613, he married Phoebe, daughter of a previous Vice-Provost, Luke Challoner, and published his first work. In 1615, he was closely involved with the drawing up of the first confession of faith of the Church of Ireland.

In 1640, Ussher left Ireland for England for what turned out to be the last time. In the years before the English Civil War, his reputation as a scholar and his moderate Calvinism meant that his opinion was sought by both King and Parliament. After Ussher lost his home and income through the Irish uprising of 1641, Parliament voted him a pension of £400 while the King awarded him the income and property of the vacant See of Carlisle.

In early 1641 Ussher developed a mediatory position on church government, which sought to bridge the gap between the Laudians, who believed that bishops were divinely ordained and a separate order from priests and deacons, and the presbyterians, who wanted to abolish episcopacy entirely. His proposals, not published until 1656, after his death, as The Reduction of Episcopacy, proposed a compromise where bishops operated in a presbyterian synodal system, were initially designed to support a rapprochement between Charles and the parliamentarian leadership in 1641, but were rejected by the King. They did, however, have an afterlife, being published in England and Scotland well into the eighteenth century. In all, he wrote or edited five books relating to episcopacy; the last two, treatises on the Ignatian epistles, were particular scholarly achievements that have largely survived modern scrutiny.

As the middle ground between King and Parliament vanished in 1641–1642, Ussher was forced, reluctantly, to choose between his godly Calvinist allies in parliament and his instinctive loyalty to the monarchy. Eventually, in January 1642 (having asked parliament's permission), he moved to Oxford, a royalist stronghold. Though Charles severely tested Ussher's loyalty by negotiating with the Catholic Irish rebels, the Primate remained committed to the royal cause, though as king's fortunes waned Ussher had to move on to Bristol, Cardiff, and then to St Donat's. In June 1646, he returned to London under the protection of his friend, the Countess of Peterborough, in whose houses he stayed from then on. He became a preacher at Lincoln's Inn early in 1647, and despite his royalist loyalties was protected by his friends in Parliament. He watched the execution of Charles I from the roof of the Countess of Peterborough's London house but fainted before the axe fell.

In 1655, Ussher published his last book, De Graeca Septuaginta Interpretum Versione, the first serious examination of the Septuagint, discussing its accuracy as compared with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. In 1656, he went to stay in the Countess of Peterborough's house in Reigate, Surrey. On 19 March, he felt a sharp pain in his side after supper and took to his bed with what sounds like an internal haemorrhage. He died at one o'clock on 21 March at the age of 75. His last words were reported as O Lord forgive me, especially my sins of omission. His body was embalmed and was to have been buried in Reigate, but at Cromwell's insistence he was given a state funeral on 17 April and buried in the chapel of St Erasmus in Westminster Abbey.

(source: www.wikipedia.org)




(On pg. 3) - "Philip king of Macedonians was appointed as leader of the scared war against Phoceans by the Amphictyonic League, which constitutes the common council of Greece."

- If Macedonians were not considered as Greeks, Philip would never have been appointed as leader of the sacred war by the Amphictyonic League, a pan-Greek religious organisation which governed the most sacred site in Ancient Greece, the temple of Apollo at Delphi.

(On pg. 34) - "I notice that Epiphanios uses the names of the Macedonian months in four different ways. Names of the months in one way according the Macedonians, and the rest according the all Greeks, and under the Greek name means not only the ones who live in Greece but also the one who live in Asia and Syria."

(On pg. 41) - ""Macedonian names of celestial signs."

- Those names are in fact the Greek names of the 12 zodiac signs/constellations: Ζυγός, Σκορπιός, Τοξότης, Αιγόκερως, Υδροχόος, Ιχθύς, Κριός, Ταύρος, Δίδυμοι, Καρκίνος, Λέων, Παρθένος.

Discovered by M.P.