Much of our knowledge is fragmentary, as much ancient literature has been lost, but some hitherto unknown facts are emerging following the successful unrolling and deciphering of carbonised papyrus scrolls in a Roman villa recently excavated near the village of Pompeii.
Included is a whole codex of successful predictions of the dates of the Full Moon for March 454 BC by Sinecure Gratias, Court Astronomer to King Halitosis the Great of Macedon.
Sinecure was the first to combine mathematics and observational astronomy, building on Egyptian foundations. He referred in his book to the lost writings of Protractor, Surveyor of capital works to King Cheops, and who measured out the foundations of the Great Pyramid, near modern Cairo.
Protractor had, for 32 years, precisely fixed the rising positions of the Full Moon on the flat Egyptian desert East of the Nile, and constructed an elaborate grid reference, which enabled him to form a precise estimate of true east.
Combining this with observations of the star Thuban, enabled him to deduce the direction of North, after which South and West soon followed. Sinecure was able to translate the writings of Protractor from the original demotic script, and quoted fragments extensively.
A great loss to ancient astronomy was the early death of the Roman philosopher Oratorio, who was tragically killed during the Civil War following the assassination of Emperor Gluteus Maximus who was stabbed in the rotunda in the year 82 AD.
Oratorio deduced from harmonic scales the underlying order of the universe, and using musical analogies, drew the correct conclusions from the reports of the transit of Mars across the Sun during the Bacchanalia of August, 79 AD.
His ship was sunk when he was taking passage to Alexandria to take up the position of astrologer in residence, to which he had been appointed by Alexander the Median, descendent of Halitosis, and Chief Gravitas of that Museum.
Alexander had developed the novel theory that the pyramids were actually anti-gravity flying devices which could move between the stars using energy generated by the matrix of some hundreds of thousands of carefully shaped stone blocks.
He deduced that mummification was actually a form of suspended animation to enable themselves to travel far in space and time in their protective sarcophagi, and conducted experiments attempting to revive many of the thousands of mummified cats excavated from caves near Thebes.
Much of the medical work in this regard was performed by his pupil, Feline the Persian. These experiments were, alas, unsuccessful but did produce several accidental discoveries.
It was found that cheese stored in the burial chamber, deep inside the pyramid of Khufu, kept much better than similar cheese stored on the head of the Sphinx, and that mummified cats made superlative fertiliser.
After the death of Alexander, Feline, being passed over for promotion, moved to Roman Londinium and established a brewery producing Egyptian-style beer. It is believed that the British preference for warm ale dates from this event.
It is not widely known that Emperor Nero had a scientific bent, as well as being bent on many other things. His much maligned burning of Rome, so newly discovered chronicles tell us was partly directed to slum clearance, but principally motivated at examining the spectral emissions of a whole range of burning objects through one of the new glass bottles of Egyptian wine.
Nero's partner, former slave Genda Unspecificus, had been conducting numerous experiments with glass bottles and a surviving portion of Nero's biography, which survived in the villa collection, tells of this.
The biography, by Roman scholar Erudite suggests that Genda may have made the first advances in the study of optics.
Certainly, he personally emptied thousands of bottles of wine, and is reported to have said that the further he went in his experiments, the more different things looked.