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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Greece really was special. While other civilizations had made important discoveries in math, the Greeks created the conception of math as grounded in theoretical proof.
Insight is one of the hardest events to explain, and we can’t give total explanations for events in history more generally. We might guess that the Greeks had an interest in and knack for thought and discovery.
But Athens was also a democracy, a rarity in the ancient world. This is a salient coincidence with their accomplishments. So democracy might foster more independent interest and thought. Another factor could be the highly competitive attitude of the Greeks.
Research and development can be expensive, and it can be hard to figure out how to start if you have no general / theoretical knowledge to guide you. Kings and pharaohs might not have imagined that there were yet unknown laws and general facts *to discover -* much less the skill or interest to promote that research.
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