In the 4th century BC, a Greek explorer named Pythias, from the Greek colony of Mausalia,

the city that today we call Marseille, went on a voyage of exploration into northern Europe.

He circumnavigated the island of Britain and visited a place he called Tule, where, he said, the sun shone for 22 hours

during the summer solstice, and the natives told him that a little farther north, the sea itself

was solid. Many scholars in the ancient world doubted these claims.

Modern scholars are more credulous.

Many believe he did indeed visit what we today call Norway,

perhaps somewhere around Trondheim, and produced the first written record of the extreme conditions of the far north.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century. Episode 59

Ultima Tule

Ultimatouet means something like

Farthest Tule and is how the semi-mythical Tule of Pithias'

explorations was referred to in ancient times. The phrase came to be used poetically to describe

a distant place or a far-off goal that was all but beyond reach. Since ancient times, many different human communities across the northern hemisphere

worked out a few basic facts about the nighttime sky.

While most stars are only visible during certain seasons,

there is a region of the sky to the north where the same stars can be seen

any night of the year. These stars circle around one particular star, an average star not

noticeably different from the others, that is often called the North Star. The oldest known

written record noting these facts comes from Mesopotamia and is more than 5,000 years old.

The ancient Greek scholars understood that the farther north one traveled, the higher the north

star rose in the sky, and the larger became the region of sky that was always visible.

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