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

bar-
barophilia Plutarch imputed to him. Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who were
not noted for sympathy with the ‘barbarians’, admitted as well that they were
the teachers of many discoveries. To answer this question, we have to under-
stand a quite peculiar way the Oriental borrowings were reflected in Greek
tradition. Archytas’ fragment on the two ways of acquiring new knowledge (47
B 3), mentioned above, reveals an important and widely employed pattern of
Greek thought. One can either learn something new from another and with an-
other’s assistance or discover it himself and by his own means. As a matter of
fact, the companion notions of ‘learning/imitation – discovery’ (máqhsi~/
mímhsi~ – eÛresi~) were one of the few available instruments for explaining
78
On this subject, see Zhmud.
Wissenschaft, 206f.

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3. Inventors and imitators. Greece and the Orient
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the origin of cultural phenomena.
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All ‘discoveries’ (i.e., any element of civili-
zation) not attributed to gods and in want of authors may be said to have fallen
into two groups: indigenous and borrowed. The foreign inventors, apart from
such ‘personalities’ as Busiris, Cadmus, or Anacharsis, remained as a rule
anonymous, their names being of little interest,
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while the Greek
pro¯toi heure-
tai tended to be personified. This scheme may account for the importance of
travel to the Orient as one of the major means of learning and transmitting
knowledge. Such a voyage was traditionally assigned to nearly every one of the
famous thinkers from Thales and Pythagoras to Democritus and Plato. Before
setting to the task of invention himself, a sage had to study with his teacher and
then make a journey to Egypt, Babylon, or, at least, to the Persian Magi; this
was considered an indispensable part of his education.
This prevailing scheme implies that the Greeks were ready to admit their
substantial debt to their Oriental neighbors. The problem is that they did it in a
very inadequate way. A contemporary list of the safely attested Oriental bor-
rowings made ca. 850–500 BC is quite impressive; it includes dozens of things
in the most diverse areas of technology and culture;
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a lot more things are still
disputed. But this list owes very little to direct references in the Greek sources.
Furthermore, it is for the most part incompatible with the respective Greek lists
of the Oriental ‘discoveries’. With a few notable exceptions, the Greek tradition
either passes over in silence things that were really taken over or attributes them
to its own cultural heroes.
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On the other hand, as a kind of compensation for
this, it persistently ascribes to the most of its neighbors a lot of things they did
not invent or did not have at all. The tradition on the borrowings in philosophy
is totally fictitious. In the case of
mathe¯mata it is distorted, widely exaggerated,
and manifestly imprecise. Among the hundreds of references to Egyptian and
Chaldaean mathematics and astronomy that fill the Greek literature, at most a
few can be accepted as historically correct. The real picture of the Babylonian
influence on Greek astronomy would later be reconstructed on the basis of the
cuneiform studies and is still a matter of continual debate.
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79
For more details, see below, 2.3.
80
Kremmer,
op. cit., 113f., lists a prodigious number of nation-inventors: Africans,
Arabs, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cappadocians, Carians, Chaldaeans, Egyptians,
Etruscans, Gauls, Illyrians, Isaurians, Jews, Libyans, Lydians, Memphites, My-
sians, Pelasgians, Persians, Samnites, Sicilians, Syrians, Telchites, Troglodytes,
Phrygians, Phoenicians (and, separately, Carthaginians, Sidonians, and Tyrians),
Thracians. Individuals among the foreign inventors are represented only sporadi-
cally.
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Burkert, W.