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PERISCIAN
The word periscian cropped up on our Twitter feed recently, defined simply as “someone who lives in a polar region”. And, as is often the case with unassuming words like this one, scratch beneath the surface and there’s a great etymological tale to tell.
Periscian was coined by the Ancient Greek philosopher and geographer Posidonius from the Greek roots peri, meaning “around” or “encircling”, and skia, meaning “shadow”. That peri is the same peri– that crops up in words like perimeter, periscope, and periphrasis (“longwinded, roundabout speech”), and also turns up in period (which meant “circuit” or “cycle” in Ancient Greek), Pericles (whose name literally meant “famous everywhere”), and peristalsis, the wave-like muscular movement that pushes food through the digestive system (and which essentially means “contracting” or “constricting around”).
Skia meanwhile crops up in a handful of albeit fairly obscure English words like sciatherics, “the science of using shadows to tell the time”, and skiamachy, a formal name for shadow-boxing or, more figuratively, a sham fight or angry dispute. It’s also found in the adjective sciapodous, meaning “having large feet”—but that’s a word that deserves its own blogpost at a later date...
But how does a word meaning something like “casting a shadow all around” come to refer to someone who lives at the Poles? Well, as you might have already worked out, it’s all to do with geography.
One of the subjects that most interested Posidonius was the size and arrangement of the continents. Writing in the second century BC, he came up with a method of dividing all the land on the surface of the Earth into three latitudinal bands or zones that he called the Amphiscian, the Heteroscian and the Periscian—each name referring to the shape and position of the shadows of the people who lived in each one.
This “Posidonian” system of dividing the Earth was then picked up and expanded on by later scholars and geographers, including Cicero, Plutarch and Strabo, the latter of which considered Posidonius “the most learned of all philosophers of my time”. As he explained:
Amphiscians are all those who at midday have their shadows sometimes projecting this way, to the north ... [and] sometimes in the opposite direction when the Sun changes round to the opposite way ... This happens only to those who live between the tropics.
Heteroscians, on the other hand, are either all those whose shadow falls to the north, like us, or all those whose shadow falls to the south, like the inhabitants of the southern temperate zone.
Strabo, Geography (c. 7 BC)
That left the Periscians, who dwelt at extreme latitudes where uninterrupted sunlight during the summer months caused their shadows to “traverse in a circle” around them.
So while the Amphiscians literally had “both-way shadows”, and the Heteroscians had “same-way shadows”, the Periscians were wholly encircled by their shadows, like the spike on a sundial:
PERISCII are the inhabitants of the two Frozen Zones, or those who live within the compass of the Arctick and Antarctick Circles; for as the Sun never goes down to them once he is up, but always round about, so do their Shadows. Whence the Name.
John Harris, Lexicon Technicum: A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1704)
He may have invented the term, but Posidonius came to a somewhat misguided conclusion about the Periscians: he didn’t believe they existed. In a later discussion of the size of the lands of the Earth (that only survives in a fragment today) he wrote:
Periscians are of no importance in relation to geography, for these parts are uninhabitable because of the cold ... So there is no need to worry about the size of this uninhabited land.
And that really is cold.