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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Because the Greeks started pursuing what we would call science from almost ground zero. Before the late Greek archaic period, the existing technologies were seen as an outgrowth of religious practices, usually performed under the auspices of priests. The Ionian Greeks started investigating natural phenomena looking for natural causes of the observed phenomena. This caught on, and hundreds, if not thousands of them, began to inquire into the natural world, looking for real-world answers.They were the first to do this. (at least, in the west) So, in other words, lots of low hanging fruit.
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