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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Depends on what you’re exposed to and what language you speak.
China, Egypt, India, Persia, etc. all had scientists as well… but we rarely hear about them, probably because of the inertia of historical racism TBH.
Hell, even ancient Hawai’i had theories on evolution, but then you start facing that language barrier where every word has, like, 4 different meanings.
I suspect a lot of cultures, especially indigenous ones, had a lot of science that has been lost due to being wiped out – it’s a danger of limiting knowledge to an extremely limited number of people.
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