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Ancient Babylonians Figured Out Forerunner of Calculus (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Tracking and recording the motion of the sun, the moon, and the planets as they paraded across the desert sky, ancient Babylonian astronomers used simple arithmetic to predict the positions of celestial bodies. Now, new evidence reveals that these astronomers, working several centuries B.C.E., also employed sophisticated geometric methods that foreshadow the development of calculus. Historians had thought such techniques did not emerge until more than 1400 years later, in 14th century Europe.
Because the youngest end of their date range is less than 100 years BCE, and off-by-one is close-enough. Likely it 200 years older, but that isn't certain. 350 to 50 BCE is the range given.
Wait, the Vikings discovered it and settled it.
They didn't go around telling people they'd invented it, but they sure as hell 'discovered' it and navigated back and forth.
The entire point is Europeans, after many hundreds of years rooting around in the muck like ignorant morons, rediscovered many things which had been known in antiquity ... and then proceeded to pretend like the barbarians who came before them were far too unsophisticated to have known this stuff.
And increasingly that view of history written to soothe the egos of those Europeans and their descendants is proven to be largely rubbish, which has nothing to do with reality.
And I say this as a white guy of European ancestry -- what we call history is really mostly "the history as told by white people who had no clue about what was really happening before they got their heads out of their asses".
While Europe rooted around in the muck and the filth, they forgot that things like math, navigation, and indoor plumbing had been around for a very long time. And then they pretended like they invented them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It was more than that, and he did have an inkling of the use. But he treated it as academic. In college, we had to study his technique for integrating the area under a curve. Specifically, the area of a spiral. And he got it right. We even applied it to other geometry with success.
What made it painful was that it was done without algebra or even the symbol pi. Think long wordy descriptions involving limits and ratios and you end up with 3 pages of text for what takes half a line in modern notation. Heck, even his result takes a couple lines to write.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
No, my narrative hasn't got a fucking thing to do with racism.
After the Dark Ages, where the Church basically did their best to wipe out human knowledge and sanitize everything ... then the descendants of those damned people went about "discovering" everything they had long since forgotten.
The point isn't white, brown, pink or yellow skin ... it's about morons obliterating knowledge and history for their own purposes and then being too clueless to realize they'd just "discovered" things which had been known before.
Self inflicted ignorance isn't some noble thing to hold up for all to see.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There's a good reason that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are called "Abrahamic" religions.
Abraham (Abram) had a son by a concubine (Hagar). That son was named Ishmael. The Arabs claim ancestry back to him. He also had a son by his wife (Sarai/Sarah). That son was named Isaac. The Jews claim ancestry back to him. Jesus (Christ) was a Jew.
Abraham was from "Ur of the Chaldeans", also known as Uruk. The name hasn't changed. That place is still called Iraq. (Say both of those names out loud if you don't "get it".) Specifically, the city of Ur was in the southern part of the Euphrates basin, right about where it curves east and runs to the Persian Gulf.
Babylon was much farther to the north and a little east, where the Euphrates and Tigris run closest to each other. You can still see where Babylon was on Google Maps. It's immediately north west of Al-Iqsandariya (Alexandria), Iraq. It's a scorch mark, basically. Nothing grows there, nothing lives there. There was a prophecy issued about that in the 800's BC. (Isaiah 13:20, specifically.) Interestingly, it holds true despite many attempts to make use of that portion of land. Make of that what you will.
Civilizations tend to "discover" philosophy, mathematics, literature, drama and great works of music in the centuries after they invent ways of writing those things down.
What's probably going on is that these things have been cropping up intermittently for thousands of years (or tens of thousands of years), but the ideas would usually not survive for very long because it would take unreasonable amounts of human effort to remember and transmit them.
By the way, video finally made it possible to commit dancing to permanent media in the early 1900's, so future historians will probably think of the 1900's and 2000's as the centuries when great dancing was first invented.
They brought us Goezer and the StayPuft Marshmellow man.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
After the Dark Ages, where the Church basically did their best to wipe out human knowledge and sanitize everything...
I was under the impression that it was rather the opposite. In reality the "dark ages" were neither literally nor figuratively dark. The name was given by Italians who were butthurt about not ruling the world anymore.
It also seems that Christianity (Catholic monks in particular) was responsible for preserving western culture, civilization, and knowledge during the "dark ages" not destroying it.
Even a gutter press site like Cracked seems to disagree with you on this matter.
Contrariwise, there's a lot of evidence that certain modern, "scientific", and atheistic governments have destroyed and censored knowledge (I've linked only a few obvious and famous examples but there are others).
No. What the church brought was stagnation and illiteracy. Anyone caught translating the bible was burned at the stake.
Another myth. (Note -- before I go on, I'm NOT Catholic, and I have no interest in defending the Catholic Church. But I do think we have a moral duty to accurate history.)
The Catholic Church punished people who translated the Bible AND threatened heresy/schism, etc. Yes, there were some incidents in medieval Europe where translators were punished, but that was because they were associated with political movements against the church. If you wanted to translate the Bible AND lead an insurrection, sure they might kill you.
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples where portions or the entirety of the Bible were translated in the years 1000-1500, and the Church didn't do anything to the translators. It only became a significant controversy after the whole Luther thing and the Counter-Reformation.
By the way, I don't mean this to be argumentative or even that you should have known this. Errors in scholarship have a long life, and there were some influential studies done on this stuff based on incomplete evidence and erroneous interpretations of medieval documents in the early 1900s. That's why this myth endures.
But it's a myth nonetheless.
And illiteracy was just a consequence of lack of utility. Parchment was expensive -- how many animals did you have to kill and skin to make a book? So, why would literacy be common until paper became cheap in the 1400s (due to a sudden excess of scrap linen that could be pulped)?
Preserving the bad ideas of the Greeks may or may not have been a good thing. We might have been better off flushing the whole thing and starting over completely from scratch.
Well, that's all very debatable. Arguably the major medieval renaissance in knowledge was in part driven by reclaiming the knowledge of the ancients, which in turn led to what most people think of as the real "Renaissance," which in turn led to Humanistic enterprises that were no longer dominated by the Church, which led to the Scientific Revolution.
That's only one way of telling the story, of course. But there's some truth to it.
The real problem was not being able to challenge bogus crap for 1000 years.
You really have no idea what medieval Scholasticism was about, then, do you? Medieval universities were largely started by priests and monks. Debates were the norm. Empiricism and logical argument were combined into a new method. Challenging accepted facts was commonplace. In fact, some historians of science actually argue that the reason why the West had a "Scientific Revolution" and other places (e.g., China, the Arab world) didn't was because of the accepted level of scholarly debate that occurred in the West compared to other areas of the world... which didn't have the same kinds of debates.
Disinformation....
Looks pretty lush actually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...