3 ms·

I'm not entirely convinced by this. There is a common pattern in the biographies of the early Greek astronomers in which the biographer says that they traveled

I'm not entirely convinced by this. There is a common pattern in the biographies of the early Greek astronomers in which the biographer says that they traveled to Egypt or the East to learn their astronomy and mathematics. It's enough of a trope that scholars think that at least in some cases tales of traveling to the East were embellished to add credence to the astronomer's ideas. But in most cases it does seem that in many cases Greek astronomers really did travel to either Egypt or Babylonia to learn astronomy and mathematics and were quite open about it. There's a story about how Eudoxus, who was very poor for a Greek philosopher, had to raise funds from his friends to afford to travel to Egypt and study with the priests there. After seeing the observatory that the Egyptians used he decided to build one of his own in Cnidos. Ptolemy was also explicit about the fact that he used Babylonian records to validate his planetary model (though he complains about their quality in places). None of this is to say that by the early modern era Western scholars had neglected eastern influences. But the Greeks themselves were very willing to acknowledge their eastern influences.

schuyler2d 4y ago
I think it filters through multiple layers. So Greeks had a bias both engaging/naming locals rather than people from outside -- so much that we know a ton about Greek 'lost works' but notice that their sources when they learned from their travels weren't named in the same way. The Greeks, whether willful or lazy, didn't seem to reliably understand with much precision the cultures they discussed. A favorite example of mine is how we hear of the "Hanging Gardens of Bablyon" (edit: instead of Nineveh) seems mostly to be from the Greeks not caring much the difference between one city and another in the Middle East.[1] (where it also seems "Archimedes' Screw" should also be attributed to someone else). These sources mention they're not original, but both contemporary all the way to modern secondary sources then reference the Greek or other 'Western' person that introduced this concept. Even when conscious of the more complicated origin, it's justified by having a common reference or more easily pronounceable/culturally relevant name. As a ~sibling comment~ (edit: your comment) then mentions, later secondary critics become skeptical that the author really had a past attribution or were they trying to give better authority to their own ideas (or in Kondiaronk's case, to add deniability for possibly heretical or treasonous ideas). And then modern glosses use the excuse of summarizing the Western intellectual history -- so what if Al Kindi came up with the first correct understanding of how optics works -- what matters is what Europeans read in Aristotle and later in Newton, etc. Credit and real history are available, but they are discussed incredibly rarely -- when the idea of a scientist in the Middle Ages is evoked, it's not someone that has learned Arabic or depends on Arabic translations to learn, but in popular media, only the original (or locally original) things are favored (lens-making, etc). Those are often genuinely great things, or genuinely changed something in Europe. In science discourse, itself, we often favor the first named person we know that introduced a concept, but which names have been preferred goes back to that erased history that includes all of those biases. You might swim in texts that credit the original civilizations that we know discovered these texts, but in secondary education and popular accounts they're completely erased. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... (small edits)

schuyler2d 4y ago

I think it filters through multiple layers. So Greeks had a bias both engaging/naming locals rather than people from outside -- so much that we know a ton about Greek 'lost works' but notice that their sources when they learned from their travels weren't named in the same way. The Greeks, whether willful or lazy, didn't seem to reliably understand with much precision the cultures they discussed. A favorite example of mine is how we hear of the "Hanging Gardens of Bablyon" (edit: instead of Nineveh) seems mostly to be from the Greeks not caring much the difference between one city and another in the Middle East.[1] (where it also seems "Archimedes' Screw" should also be attributed to someone else). These sources mention they're not original, but both contemporary all the way to modern secondary sources then reference the Greek or other 'Western' person that introduced this concept. Even when conscious of the more complicated origin, it's justified by having a common reference or more easily pronounceable/culturally relevant name. As a ~sibling comment~ (edit: your comment) then mentions, later secondary critics become skeptical that the author really had a past attribution or were they trying to give better authority to their own ideas (or in Kondiaronk's case, to add deniability for possibly heretical or treasonous ideas). And then modern glosses use the excuse of summarizing the Western intellectual history -- so what if Al Kindi came up with the first correct understanding of how optics works -- what matters is what Europeans read in Aristotle and later in Newton, etc. Credit and real history are available, but they are discussed incredibly rarely -- when the idea of a scientist in the Middle Ages is evoked, it's not someone that has learned Arabic or depends on Arabic translations to learn, but in popular media, only the original (or locally original) things are favored (lens-making, etc). Those are often genuinely great things, or genuinely changed something in Europe. In science discourse, itself, we often favor the first named person we know that introduced a concept, but which names have been preferred goes back to that erased history that includes all of those biases. You might swim in texts that credit the original civilizations that we know discovered these texts, but in secondary education and popular accounts they're completely erased. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... (small edits)