I mean, Eratosthenes accurately measuring the size of the Earth, advances in geometry and math, etc. I just read that Thales of Miletus might have predicted an eclipse in 500 BCE. Making discoveries about the natural world that Europe didn’t get back to for like 2,000 years.
I know Greece wasn’t the *only* region that had mathematicians, but it was “just” a bunch of cities, almost a backwater, while Persia was a whole empire and Mesopotamia and Egypt were massive centers of civilization. I’d *think* that the biggest, richest cities that had stable empires protecting them would be the most likely to support scientific and technological discoveries.
Does Greece get so much attention just because we Westerners have decided to pay tons of attention to it? Have we forgotten centuries of great minds because they didn’t happen to live in Greece at the time? Or was there really something special about ancient Greece?
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The breakthrough came in a town called Miletus. It was a trading town, doing business with Egypt, Persia, Greeks, and elsewhere.
Oversimplifying:
Each of the groups they traded with had their own gods, and used their own gods to explain natural phenomena. In Miletus people began to say, they can’t all be right. What if none of them are right? Can we find an explanation for wind and clouds and stuff without using gods at all? And so science emerges from the clash of different religions.
That is simplified beyond reason. Of course it’s more complex. But that’s sort of at the core of it.
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