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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I think you’re underestimating how much science have been done elsewhere in the ancient world.
Think al-gebra or arabic numerals (which actually originated in India).
We know better about Greeks only because we have direct line of “intellectual descent” from them via the Roman Empire without significant breaks and with the language never becoming illegible.
The ancient indian Civilization were pioneering mathematicians and philosophy. Most of their work lost due to islamic invasions or translated and inculcated into persian mathematics. you may find some of their contributions [here](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374837611_The_Contribution_Of_Ancient_Indians_To_The_World_Of_Science_And_Technology_International_Journal_of_Creative_Research_Thoughts_IJCRT_ISSN2320-2882)
The breakthrough came in a town called Miletus. It was a trading town, doing business with Egypt, Persia, Greeks, and elsewhere.
Oversimplifying:
Each of the groups they traded with had their own gods, and used their own gods to explain natural phenomena. In Miletus people began to say, they can’t all be right. What if none of them are right? Can we find an explanation for wind and clouds and stuff without using gods at all? And so science emerges from the clash of different religions.
That is simplified beyond reason. Of course it’s more complex. But that’s sort of at the core of it.
They didn’t produce “so much” science, they just *did* science and it accumulated.
Educated men, everywhere, usually just earned their living by teaching kids of nobles or became priests of some sort. But didn’t really study their area beyond daily need that much, let alone spread the knowledge – their trade secret – around for free.
Society of Greece gave such educated people opportunity to actually research problems and create new science. Like patronage and other forms of having resources to spend some time to actually study things.
And in such societal climate, such a place can quickly turn into scientific hub, where ideas are exchanged and argued and so on. Soon, even traders and commoners will notice that new ideas of mathematicians will make it easier for trade ships to navigate or engineers to build better bridges and mills. So supporting studies becomes even more common.
Also, their ideas have preserved well throughout history, because Greece by itself was a place with a lot of trade and visitors, and thus, knowledge spread very well, both in and out.
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