Names
Like most of the other maria on the Moon, Mare Imbrium was named by Giovanni Riccioli, whose 1651 nomenclature system has become standardized.
The earliest known name for the mare may be "The Shrine of Hecate"; Plutarch records that the Ancient Greeks gave this name to the largest of the "hollows and deeps" on the Moon, believing it to be the place where the soul of the deceased were tormented. Ewen A. Whitaker argues that this likely refers to Mare Imbrium, "the largest regular-shaped dark area unbroken by bright patches" that can be seen with the naked eye.
Around 1600, William Gilbert made a map of the Moon that names Mare Imbrium "Regio Magna Orientalis" (the Large Eastern Region). Michael van Langren's 1645 map named it "Mare Austriacum" (the Austrian Sea).
Read more about this topic: Mare Imbrium
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“It was a poetic recreation to watch those distant sails steering for half-fabulous ports, whose very names are a mysterious music to our ears.... It is remarkable that men do not sail the sea with more expectation. Nothing was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)