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 Ionian Greeks were a cosmopolitan people who 1) had no independent priestly class with the authority interfere with speculation about the cosmos like what happened in many other ancient societies; 2) had a literary tradition obsessed with finding the fundamental substance/source of all things–starting with cosmogonies like Hesiod’s, but gradually becoming decreasingly mythologized and more naturalistic partially due to point 1 above; 3) had an aristocratic leisure class who spent time talking to the intelligentsia and travelers from other areas who came to their cities for trade and the like, and enjoyed speculating about things and writing these speculations down.
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