I wanted a system of 366 characters to represent days of the year. I wanted to encode in each character something from Ancient Greece so that each image is a shortcut to learning something about Ancient Greece.

This article is another system where cartoon people are created based on a set of rules. My aim is to make people images: people who represent concepts from Ancient Greece:

Constellations

Mythological characters;

People from Ancient Greece (thanks to Scott for letting me use the list in his article at BestEdLessons.com).

I really wanted to have a credible image per Greek mythology character or historical Greek person for this article. I wanted the genre of the character (eg. a giant) to help me to remember that the character is a giant in Greek mythology. However, I ran into difficulties.

Now that I can use generative AI, I have been working on assigning a year's worth of people (366 peope) to about 20 popular art genres of characters (eg. cowboys or zombies). Those genres can map to the 20 Greek character types which I list below.

The hair colour of a cartoon character should match the month based on the Colours article. E.g. Since Orange is digit 1, the 31 January people need to have orange hair.

And here is a list of concepts (starting with constellations, then mythological characters, then real people from Ancient Greece):

Here are the 366 images:

There are three gender types: Male, Female, Neuter ('---'). Neuter is for where a character is not easy to visualise as being male or female. I use characters with sunglasses as an indicator that a character represents a Neuter concept.

The first 3 letters of a name might act as prompts for jargon that also begins with those letters - maybe medical terms that start with the same few letters.

There is the dilemma that a cowboy genre person (etc.) is not Greek mythology. So I think they should all be narrators who can tell the story of the person or character whose name is associated with them. I have played with video morphing a person into a Greek mythology equivalent. So, a cowboy's face could persisit but the outfit would switch to one consistent with Greek mythology.

Here are the colours again:

The Ancient Greeks

Historians note the gap between the rapid intellectual leaps of the Ancient Greeks and the relatively lower advances after that brief period. It took many centuries before there were rapid successions of leaps again - and, for maths, that was on the back of scholars referring to the work of the Ancient Greeks.

Note:Some people say that the geology of the Greeks' part of the world was ideal for some of their technological developments.

I think that part of the extended delay in us reaching the technology which we have today is that there was a long period of censorship in European history: you had to say the 'right things' or you could get into trouble. 'The Reformation' is a period in history where freedoms opened up a bit.

The modern leaps were also helped by factors including the invention of the printing press: books did not depend on someone slowly writing copies of pages any more.

Side note: I single out Ancient Greece but there have been other great contributions to knowledge from other old civilisations. Eg. Indian history and maths.

Further uses of the 366 images

In the Mandarin article, I was saying that subcomponents of drawn Chinese characters could have their brush strokes memorised more easily if there was an image that represents each common subcomponent that occurs in Chinese characters. So I listed 366 components and suggested that each of the mythology characters could say the English word that the component represents and then say the pinyin word that corresponds with the English word. So these 'Greek' characters could help someone to learn a non-Greek language.