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 keyword here is “seem” and that’s not to say that they didn’t, but it also doesn’t mean that they were the only ones doing it. The key difference between Greece and other contemporary regions was that one way or another they managed to write down and spread that information. And that’s something that’s not often talked about in ancient history but it’s arguably one of the most important things at the time. Proper record keeping and the spread of knowledge was crucial to the development of a region, and established frameworks for it didn’t really exist for most of human history.
Ancient Greece produced many written works that managed to survive the decline of the region because it was spread far and wide, and also co opted and developed upon by the Roman Empire who did an even better job at record keeping. And most importantly, the language was prevalent in many contexts like a Christian clerical language, a diplomatic language and a scholarly language. By contrast most ancient messopotamian languages died out, just like ancient Egyptian did, making any written records effectively useless, so their knowledge did not spread as far or was lost. Meanwhile regions like India or China generally kept to themselves and had no contact with Europe, the Middle East and North Africa which were regions that traded and exchanged knowledge for centuries.
And of course there’s the obsession of high class Europeans with ancient Greece that definitely helped in preserving and spreading this knowledge even further.
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