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?
In: Other
Mostly because they sat at the east and west crossroads, so they were able to absorb cultural artifacts from places like India; which is where they likely learned about trig ratios. We have imperfect historical records so sometimes things are attributed to Greece when, in actuality, it should be attributed to Babylon or India or someone else.
Now, that isn’t to say that Greece doesn’t deserve the accolades we give them, you mentioned a couple of big ones but there are more. Anaxagoras (~500 BCE) posited that the stars were not ‘heavenly orbs’ but huge flaming rocks that appeared to us to be small because they were just extremely far away. We are talking like…the time of Hubble (Edwin, the namesake of the telescope) when he was essentially proven correct. Aristarchus of Samos (~310 BCE) developed the heliocentric model; something that was finally accepted as fact in the days of Galileo. Leucippus (my handle!) ~5th century BCE developed the idea of the atomism (uncuttable, indivisible) which is often attributed to his student whose name will sound familiar to Americans – Democritus.
That is just the realm of science and math, Greek philosophy also has many modern ideas – like absurdism, which we normally attribute to someone like Camus could easily be said of Diogenes. If you want to learn and laugh, read about Diogenes. Even the idea of atheism, something we typically think of as a renaissance idea, has its roots in Greek philosophy as ideas of mechanism and the natural world being the only *thing* was explored.
Greek literature *is* Western literature, the first real novel (one meant to be read cover to cover and not as a lyrical poem performed), *Don Quixote* is a satire of the hero’s journey, screw you *Odyssey.*
It is important to point out that I said a lot of Greek names, but with things like atomism, there is substantial evidence that these ideas were Indian in nature. That doesn’t necessarily take away from the Greeks, but it illustrates ***why*** Greece was such a breeding ground for civilization – they were open to ideas from the orient and were capable of collecting and disseminating that information. Greece wasn’t just Greece, it was Greece and her colonies – a word that is Green in origin. Marseille started life as a Greek colony, and that was just one of many. So, as Greece was learning from places like India, and developing their own ideas – their economic system and seafaring ways (not unlike Great Britain) was able to seed this culture across the Mediterranean and places we would consider ‘Western’ civilization.
Latest Answers