Peter Hume, Thinker 2

Thank you for your kind words:

You may enjoy this piece on Aristarchus.

http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro2201/aristarchus.htm

Aristarchus was the first person we know of to:

--Deduce that the moon was smaller than the Earth while the sun was much bigger.

--Provide an estimate of the distances from the Earth to the moon and sun

--Hypothesise that, since the sun was so much bigger than the Earth, it was the Earth that orbited the sun rather than vice versa

And he did it all with naked eye astronomy 2300 years ago.

BTW by the time of Eratosthenes the Greeks had already guessed that the Earth was a sphere. There were three main give-aways:

--The masts of sailing ships seemed to sink as they got further from shore; AND

--Certain stars and constellations appeared lower in the sky as you went further South; AND

--As you went further South entirely new constellations appeared.

The Greeks and those, like Eratosthenes who were "Hellenised" were SMART!

In fact that whole Eastern Mediterranean area was a hot-bed of scientific enquiry.

Yes it's fascinating how they were so far ahead of everyone else.

Also bronze at that time was only about a thousand years old. So it makes you wonder how much of this great body of knowledge existed during neolithic times, ie, how advanced in knowledge stone age man was.

It is to the eternal disgrace of the Christian religion that they knowingly suppressed all that. Christianity was born into the Greek intellectual milieu of the eastern Roman empire. It was obvious to the early Christian fathers, that, if they followed the rational methods of the Greeks, they would find themselves logically disproved. So what did they do? They deliberately preferred blind faith, and illogic, and authority, over reason! Justinian closed the schools of philosophy at Athens. That's pretty gobsmacking too. Makes you wonder how advanced in the sciences we would have been but for that.

Peter,

So ...... because Eratosthenes and Aristarchus could come up with some brilliant insights, and ways to demonstrate them, on the back of some hundreds of years of scientific discoveries, commercial sopphistication and political development, therefore it just goes to show " ... how advanced in knowledge stone age man was ..." ?

Bit of a long bow, mate :)

No it doesn't go to show how advanced in knolwedge stone age man was, but it does raise the question how much of the ancients' body of knowledge, for example about astronomy and geometry, was accumulated before the advent of bronze, i.e. during the stone age.

Yes, you're right, Peter, especially since the beginning of the agricultural revolution, the neolithic proper: the ability to produce surpluses, to trade in different high-value products and therefore trade caravans and shipping, the need to store, to understand procreation and reproduction (i.e. of animals and plants), to aggregate communities into states and finance those states through taxation and tribute systems - and therefore the need to be able to measure distances, area and weights and to record transactions and stories, and therefore create the beginnings of basic education systems.

I agree that all of this formed the foundation for the development of Greek advances in so many intellectual fields. It's a fascinating and rich field of study.

Joe