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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.
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.
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.