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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Ironically, neither of the two people you named “happened to live in Greece” (as we think of it, anyway) for most of their lives. Eratosthenes was born in Libya and mostly associated with Alexandria, Egypt. Thales was from Miletus, which is in modern Turkey. They probably were ethnically or politically Greek (as we would understand it), but they spent a lot of time in “the colonies,” so to speak.
The broader point is that “Ancient Greece” wasn’t a single place or short time period. Those two guys lived literally hundreds of years apart. The Greek/Hellenistic world spread across large swaths of the Mediterranean at various times, and anywhere from like 600 to 1800 years. So while I would never minimize the influence of ancient Greece on our world today, it’s not like all these guys were hanging around the Athens agora at the same time.
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