Leonid Zhmud The Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity

Partly anticipating the analysis of the aforementioned problems, let us give a
general overview of the tradition under study. Among its first landmarks was
the trend in Greek thought that sought an answer to the popular question of
‘who discovered what’. By this trend, I mean the early heurematography of the
sixth and fifth centuries BC, which treated most different elements of culture as
discoveries (eûr2mata) and showed interest in their first discoverers (prõtoi
eûretaí). At the beginning of the fourth century, it gave birth to a special genre,
a sort of ‘catalogues of discoveries’, which survived until the very end of An-
tiquity and later provided a model for Arabic and European writers.
41
39
See e.g. Montucla, J.-E.
Histoire des mathématiques, Vol. 1, Paris 1758, viii.
40
Popper, K. R.
The logic of scientific discovery, London 1959, 15.
41
Kleingünther, A. PRWTOS EURETHS, Leipzig 1933; Wiedemann, E. Über Er-

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2. The historiography of science in Antiquity
13
Originally the quest for
pro¯toi heuretai as a sort of intermediary link be-
tween the past and the present had little to do with history. It can rather be
termed a rationalization of the mythical past, the more so because the
heuretai
themselves were often legendary and mythical figures. Still, the tradition,
though connected with myth, was nourished by genuine interest in the real
authors of cultural innovations – poets, musicians, inventors, sages. It is due to
these innovations, whose fame started to spread throughout the Greek world
from the seventh century on, that every element of culture came with time to be
regarded as someone’s discovery. Since the mid-sixth century, the various dis-
coveries mentioned in heurematography include scientific ones as well. The at-
tention the Greeks paid to questions of priority, which had so large a part in the
formation of Greek science in general, helped to save the memory of such im-
portant discoveries as, for example, Thales’ prediction of the solar eclipse.
42
Admittedly, the Peripatetic history of science is linked with heurematography
more intimately than by just employing it as a source of information on scien-
tific discoveries. In Eudemus’ history of the exact sciences, the traditional
question of ‘who discovered what’ remains among the most important. As the
earliest forerunner of the Peripatetic history of science, heurematography un-
doubtedly deserves to be considered in detail.
One of the characteristic features of the search for
pro¯toi heuretai consisted
in ruling out the possibility that the same discovery had been made twice.
43
Al-
though heurematography did often mention several authors for one and the
same discovery, it implied that only one of these versions was true. Astronomy
was discovered either by the Egyptians, or by the Babylonians, or by the
Phoenicians, but it could not emerge independently in several cultures at once.
The emergence and spread of cultural phenomena was conceived of within the
narrow framework of the ‘learning (imitation) – discovery’ formula: the new
could either be learned from another, or found independently. Any thing that
showed a superficial similarity with another, earlier one, could be declared a
borrowing. This ‘naive diffusionism’ resulted in a bias toward according prior-
ity in the invention of sciences to the Orient, especially since the Greeks were
finder nach arabischen Angaben,
Gesammelte Schriften zur arabisch-islamischen
Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Vol. 2, Frankfurt 1984, 848–850. – The history of technol-
ogy continued to exist in the form of the catalogues of discoveries until the late 18
th
century: Beckmann, J.
Beyträge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen, Vol. 1–5, Leipzig
1783–1805; Busch, G. C.
Versuch eines Handbuchs der Erfindungen, Vol. 1–8, Ei-
senach 1790–1798.
42
The first to mention Thales’ discoveries was Xenophanes (21 B 19 = Eud. fr. 144).