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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They had enough excess wealth that they they had people who could spend time figuring things out. That, and a propensity to write things down, we know how to read it, and the Romans did as well.
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