 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today is no ordinary episode. Today is an average episode. Actually, I have so much to say that it won't fit into one video, so I'm averaging it out over a three-episode series. People often seem to want to predict the future. I mean, after all, horoscopes are still regularly published in newspapers and magazines. Businesses are always trying to predict what consumers will want and what the economy is going to be like next year. And in Norse mythology, the god Odin was always after wisdom and knowledge, particularly about the impending Ragnarok, the Norse version of Doomsday. So much so that he even gives up one of his eyes for wisdom. And speaking of astrology, it's thanks to that that humans started studying the universe around us. It's why we invented constellations and star charts. But soon enough people started to use those constellations and star charts for navigation. One of the most influential star charts was produced by the Greek Ptolemy. The work was originally titled Mathematicae Syntaxis, meaning mathematical treatise, and in fact was a work on Greek mathematics with a special focus on the mass of the apparent motion of the celestial bodies as the Greeks saw it. No mean feat, as the Greek conception of the cosmos had the earth in the center with everything else revolving around it, like giant glass spheres. A notion first introduced by the philosopher Aristotle. This geocentric conception came to be known as the Ptolemaic model. The catalogue of 1,022 stars within their constellations was only part of this great work, but it would become important to celestial navigation in later eras, especially when European sailors gained the necessary naval technology to sail away from side of land into the deep ocean. But it was due to the Islamic world that the medieval west had access to this treatise, as it had been translated into Arabic and from there into Latin in the 12th century, making it available to Europeans. Its name had shifted to Hei Megalei Syntaxis, the Great Treatise, to simply Megiste, Greatest, which was rendered into Arabic as Al-Majisti, leading to the European name Al-Majest. This is an example of the enormously important contribution of the Islamic world, who transmitted and built upon the knowledge of ancient Greece to European learning. Christian Europeans generally had no access to or ability to read ancient Greek texts in their original forms. As we'll see, the Islamic world is above average in importance to our story in a number of ways. And this brings us to the word average. The earliest senses of the word have to do with maritime shipping. In English context, it originally referred to a customs duty or expense over and above the freight incurred in the shipment of goods and payable by their owner. The word seems to come from old French avai, which meant damage to shipping and by extension any expense, with the A-G-E ending coming by way of parallel to the semantically related damage. And since the usual practice was to share out these expenses between all the owners of freight on the ship, as well as the ship owners, kind of like an early form of insurance, the term gained the mathematical sense of the arithmetic mean, from the idea of distributing a sum between a number of people and the sense of typical or usual developed from there. Now, the deeper etymology of this word is a matter of some speculation and disagreement. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, few words have received more etymological investigation. But the explanation that seems to carry the most weight, and the one we're going to go with here, is that it comes from Arabic awariah, damaged goods from awar, blemish or flaw, from awira to lose an eye, from a protosemitic root that means to be or become blind. Kind of recalls Odin giving up his eye. And in a way, this is fitting since average in its maritime shipping sense, which is the beginning of insurance, is all about making plans for future contingencies. The practice now referred to as general average was to share out the losses in freight, if for instance some had to be jettisoned overboard in the event of a storm at sea in order to save the ship. The sailors therefore weren't faced with the decision of what to jettison on the basis of who owned it, since all the freight owners would share the expense of the loss. This practice goes back a long way and can be found in the Lex Rodea, a maritime code from Rhodes around 800 BCE. The law disappeared after the fall of Rome, but the principal was revived in the roles of Olaron, promulgated by Eleanor of Aquitaine, after returning from the second crusade around 1160 CE. There were of course other ancient forerunners of insurance by distributing or transferring risk, such as the 3rd century BCE Chinese practice of distributing goods among several vessels, in case one capsized in river rapids. And in the Code of Hammurabi, from around 1750 BCE, a merchant taking a loan to fund a shipment could pay an additional fee granting the loan would be cancelled in the event of theft or loss. By the way, the Code of Hammurabi also records the first evidence of interest bearing loans. But in any case, the first example of actual contract insurance for maritime shipping dates to 1347 CE in Genoa. Actual insurance laws became codified in 15th century Barcelona with the first statute in England in 1601. Insurance brokers kind of grew up organically from there, and funnily enough, we have coffee to thank for it, which is appropriate since coffee is another of those things that Europe got from the Islamic world. The word coffee came into English through Dutch and Italian from Turkish Kave, which in turn came from Arabic Kawa. The ultimate origin of the word is debated. Some trace it back to the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, where coffee was originally grown. But a more likely etymology is that it comes from a protosemitic root, which means to be or become dull or dark. Thus meaning dark stuff, appropriately enough. Interestingly, the word seems to have originally referred to a kind of wine, also dark in colour, until the Islamic prohibition against drinking alcohol made the word obsolete, whereupon it shifted over to refer to coffee, a non-alcoholic drink, which nonetheless had a pleasant effect on the drinker. The drink itself made it to Europe in the 16th century by way of Turkey. It arrived in England before the end of that century through trading by the Dutch and British East India companies, and soon coffeehouses sprang up in Europe, and they soon became centres of social life and business. For instance, the Café Parcope in Paris was where Denis Diderot and Jean Laurent D'Alembert brewed up the idea of creating the first modern encyclopedia. But more important to our story is the coffeehouse opened in London in 1686 by a man named Edward Lloyd. You see, shortly after it opened, it was relocated in 1691 to an area called Exchange Alley, which was conveniently located near the Royal Exchange, where the exchange of goods was carried out. As a result, people involved in trade and commerce began to congregate at the nearby coffeehouses, such as Lloyd's Coffeehouse. Lloyd installed a pulpit from which shipping news could be announced, and for the benefit of his patrons, engaged in their wheelings and dealings, began to compile a list of ships engaged in trade, which included information about the condition and seaworthiness of the ships, both in terms of the state of their hulls and the quality of their equipment. That way, you'd know what trade venture to underwrite. He used an alpha-numerical rating system. A1 was top-notch, both in terms of hull and equipment. That's where we get the expression A1 for something that is first-rate. At the time, a ship's hull was vulnerable to shipworms, actually a species of saltwater clam which bored into the hull. The solution for shipworm was to coat the hull with a mixture of tar and pitch. No problem for England, as their American colonies produced the necessary stuff. But after American independence, England was in a bit of a pickle. Eventually, a solution was found in sheathing the hull in copper, and that's where we get the expression copper-bottomed, as in a copper-bottomed investment, a really safe bet. The practice began with the Navy, but was soon adopted by commercial ships, and in 1777, the first such ship was listed in Lloyd's Register, and by 1786, there were 275 copper-bottomed vessels. And in case you hadn't guessed by now, Lloyd's Coffee House eventually became the great insurance market, Lloyd's of London. So thanks to Islamic prohibition and maritime shipping with its distributed averages, we have insurance brokers. Thanks for watching, and I'll be back very soon with part two of our look at the word average, in which we'll investigate the history of probability mathematics and property insurance. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe to this channel or share it. 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