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 Ionian Greeks were a cosmopolitan people who 1) had no independent priestly class with the authority interfere with speculation about the cosmos like what happened in many other ancient societies; 2) had a literary tradition obsessed with finding the fundamental substance/source of all things–starting with cosmogonies like Hesiod’s, but gradually becoming decreasingly mythologized and more naturalistic partially due to point 1 above; 3) had an aristocratic leisure class who spent time talking to the intelligentsia and travelers from other areas who came to their cities for trade and the like, and enjoyed speculating about things and writing these speculations down.
They were rich. They robbed and took everything they needed and had slaves. If you had all the time power and freedom science is a nice hobby
Ironically, neither of the two people you named “happened to live in Greece” (as we think of it, anyway) for most of their lives. Eratosthenes was born in Libya and mostly associated with Alexandria, Egypt. Thales was from Miletus, which is in modern Turkey. They probably were ethnically or politically Greek (as we would understand it), but they spent a lot of time in “the colonies,” so to speak.
The broader point is that “Ancient Greece” wasn’t a single place or short time period. Those two guys lived literally hundreds of years apart. The Greek/Hellenistic world spread across large swaths of the Mediterranean at various times, and anywhere from like 600 to 1800 years. So while I would never minimize the influence of ancient Greece on our world today, it’s not like all these guys were hanging around the Athens agora at the same time.
It was something a lot of Greeks valued. Knowledge can be incredibly valuable for things like war or commerce.
Survivors bias, there were various advanced civilisations but not all were as good at recording so a lot of what we have today comes from Greek records
Read about India’s ancient school of mathematics… They have done some solid work in trig, numerical analysis and calculus too.
I think this is an interesting question that, frankly, I don’t think I could fully explain, but I can give my opinion coming from someone who has most of their historical education in the near-east/ancient period.
Expanse of the Greek-Speaking world: Primarily what I assume to be the chief reason the Greeks were well preserved is the expanse of the Greek speaking world in the ancient period. Greek Hellenistic peoples were speading their culture to Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia, and even northern India. And unlike many other civilizations, the Greek world was conquered but much of their writings preserved by the Romans. Much the same vein, the Roman world was replaced by the Islamic world where Muslims are going to continue to preserve and spread Greek thought. Eventually, Greek thought makes its way to Europe where it become a quintessential part of late medieval and Renaissance culture and by proxy “western” culture even today. To put it simply, I think it might be confirmation bias because Greek culture was so important to the cultures that our current world is founded on.
Theological differences: Much of the Mediterranean world borrows from eachother such a the Sumerian Inaana becoming Babylonian Ishtar, then to Assyrian Ashura, then to Myceanian Aphrodite. It’s most definite that Greek astrology originates with the Babylonians. Math and sciences the Greek adopted probably came from the Near-East, but Theological differences in their cults tended to view the world more cyclical rather than whims on an angry God. The ancient near-eastern people used divination and a myriad of other ways to divine the whims of the Gods that were often sporadic and dangerous, namely Enlil’s torrential flooding. Greeks veiws the world was more cyclical, and could divine the future by examining patterns of the fates. It happens that math and sciences are absolute concepts that can be demonstrated repeatedly which lends the Greeks to uncover more of the natural world than people like the Babylonians. At least, this is what Morris Jastrow contends in some of his books.
Writing: Someone has mentioned that the Greeks wrote stuff down, which is true, but so did people like the Assyrians that thoroughly documented virtually everything (at least that’s what I’ve read). Once again, the main reason we know Greek ideas and not Assyrians is Greek culture was continously preserved until the Roman period, then revived in the Muslim world, then to Europeans, ect
>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.
Thales was several generations earlier, but by the time of Eratosthenes, Greeks *owned* Egypt and Mesopotamia. Euclid, Eratosthenes, and Archimedes were well-funded scholars in the dominant culture of the time.
Depends on what you’re exposed to and what language you speak.
China, Egypt, India, Persia, etc. all had scientists as well… but we rarely hear about them, probably because of the inertia of historical racism TBH.
Hell, even ancient Hawai’i had theories on evolution, but then you start facing that language barrier where every word has, like, 4 different meanings.
I suspect a lot of cultures, especially indigenous ones, had a lot of science that has been lost due to being wiped out – it’s a danger of limiting knowledge to an extremely limited number of people.
They were much more successful at transfer of power than the peoples around them. More stability = more people = more science = better weapons = more stability = more science. People underestimate the importance of peaceful transfer of power. That’s why some were way angrier than the rest over the Jan 6 insurgency. Before some one tries to tell me it wasn’t an insurgency I fought in Afghanistan. That’s what it looks like.
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