Drawing inspiration from other cultures

You may think of the Greeks of the fifth century BC as an early culture. But they looked

back on an honored past embodied in the works of their poets — especially Homer.

Greeks held a traditional regard for wisdom (their word for it was sophia) and for skill

with words. They also had a tradition of considering what is right and moral and

questioning how society should function.

Greeks living on the frontiers of their culture may have found their traditions

stimulated by the scholarship of other cultures. For example, Babylonians studied the

stars and planets for centuries. Also, writings from Persia and probably Egypt —

considerations of natural phenomena such as tides and stars and human inventions,

such as mathematics — circulated among the learned in Greek society. Some modern

scholars say that when the Greeks got their hands on Babylonian astronomy and

started talking about the stars as natural phenomena rather than supernatural

personalities, science began.

Traveling broadens the mind

Thales, a philosopher of the seventh century BC (who was fascinated by water),

made at least one visit to Egypt and came up with a way to measure the height of

the Great Pyramid. Standing next to the pyramid as the sun rose in the sky, he

watched his own shadow. When his shadow exactly matched his own height, he

hurried to mark the length of the pyramid’s shadow. By measuring the shadow, he

determined the pyramid’s height. Was this novel thinking on Thales’s part, or did

an Egyptian surveyor teach it to him?

Living where they did, Thales and his progeny could have seen Indian poetry or

accessed Sumerian texts. Could these guys have just taken older Eastern or African

ways of looking at the world and talked them up among their fellow Greeks? Nobody

knows for sure.