Nicolaus Copernicus of his life. At the instance of Roger Boscovich, the Catholic Church's 1758 "Index of Prohibited Books" omitted the general prohibition of works defending heliocentrism, but retained the specific prohibitions of the original uncensored versions of "De revolutionibus" and Galileo's "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems". Those prohibitions were finally dropped from the 1835 "Index". There has been discussion of Copernicus' nationality and of whether it is meaningful to ascribe to him a nationality in the modern sense. Nicolaus Copernicus was born and raised in Royal Prussia, a semiautonomous and polyglot region of the Kingdom of Poland. He was
Nicolaus Copernicus that the earth orbited the sun. Further mathematical details of Aristarchus' heliocentric system were worked out around 150 BCE by the Hellenistic astronomer Seleucus of Seleucia. Though Aristarchus' original text has been lost, a reference in Archimedes' book "The Sand Reckoner" ("Archimedis Syracusani Arenarius & Dimensio Circuli") describes a work by Aristarchus in which he advanced the heliocentric model. Thomas Heath gives the following English translation of Archimedes' text: Copernicus cited Aristarchus of Samos in an early (unpublished) manuscript of "De Revolutionibus" (which still survives), though he removed the reference from his final published manuscript. Copernicus was probably aware that