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 greeks took info from all the numerous places you mentioned. And they recorded what they did. And the recordings of it survived.
Some of the places you mentioned were warring with other of the places, some had died out. Greece was just the right place/time scenario. Then the Romans admired what the greeks did and re-recorded it. Then the christian scholars admired the romans admiring the greeks and re-re-recorded it.
And then the christian universities did the one thing that no other culture up to date had done, they separated theological study from medical/scientific (well, technically they invented science in doing this…but that is arguable i suppose).
At that time the Chinese and the Arabs and the Hindi’s all had university, but they forced their students to mix their ‘god’ stuff all up in with their math and their other studies. The western schools made a point to keep them separate.
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