Scientific Thinking Before Greece[1]

                Looking beyond the recognized sources of western civilization, namely Israel of the Bible and ancient Greece, one can see in the remote horizons of history, the original civilization that nurtured both, each in its particular way. This ancient civilization that nourished the apparent sources of western civilization, is ancient Mesopotamia, the country of Sumer and Akkad, Babylon and Nineveh.

Here it is important to mention that to single out Sumer as the sole country is not accurate, as this was a Sumero-Akkadian civilization, not to mention other prehistoric peoples, which are not clearly defined.

                The western civilization was inaugurated and launched by Christianity, which in turn, was at the junction of two ideological currents, namely, the Biblical ideology on the one hand, and the Greco-Hellenistic[2] on the other.  By this double alliance, the western civilization became a remote tributary of the Sumerians and Babylonians, who, thus become the oldest discernable ancestors of the western civilization, in a direct ascending line. From very far, Mesopotamians are part of the family of the western civilization, part of its past.

Many people, today, don't think of going beyond what the Bible teaches about our oldest ancestors of the Israelite branch, they don't want to talk about our very first beginnings.

After the "Peace of Callias" in 449 BC it was possible for Greeks to travel freely through Persia, and Democritus (460-370 BC), the Greek philosopher central to the development of the atomic theory of the universe, seized the opportunity and from Egypt passed on to Babylonia. At this time the term Chaldean had been specialized to mean a wise man. Democritus summed up his studies in Babylonia in a book titled the "Chaldean Treatise." Another treatise was entitled "On the Sacred Writings of those in Babylon", meaning the Babylonian cuneiform. Democritus came across a tablet containing the sayings of the wise Ahiqar, one of which told of a pig who went to the bath with a gentleman; when it came out, it saw a mud hole and wallowed in it. Democritus is the first Greek scientist known to have visited Babylon in person. How great was the scientific harvest brought back from this virgin field may be learned from his extant fragments and from the list of his writings. The group of his writings headed Mathematics seems more promising. His astronomical treatises can be explained only in terms of Babylonian tablets.

He began with a four part work describing the heavens, the earth, the pole, and light rays or meteorology.

Babylonian astronomers had already divided the concave celestial sphere into three concentric zones: "The Way of Anu", god of the sky above the Pole where revolved the "stars which see the Pole and never set"; "The Way of Enlil," god of the atmosphere, which the Greeks were to call the ecliptic and still later the Zodiac; and "The Way of Ea," god of the deep, far down in the celestial ocean. With the "Uranography," which we can restore almost completely from Vitruvius (first century BC, Roman architect and engineer), went a number of "planispheres," on which were pictured, in imitation of Babylonian terms, the human and animal figures which have come to represent the constellations.[3]

As to the other branch, namely the Hellenic branch, no one with a sound mind would adhere to the famous "miracle", according to which the Greeks suddenly appeared in a world of anthropoids, and invented and created everything out of nothing. Still, many unconsciously stick to a similarly extravagant doctrine. But, by so doing, they do not feel the least need to go beyond their Greek superhumans, to search for their origins in the direction of these "Barbarians", whom the author of the Epinomis (987a-988a) was, with some respect, directing them. The Epinomis is one of Plato's works (born 428/427; died 348/347 B.C.). The work is in the form of a dialogue between three persons. In the course of the dialogue, mention is made to non-Greek origins of astronomical knowledge, as follows: "But the reason <987a> of this is, because a Barbarian was the first spectator of these. For an ancient region is the nurse of those who first understood these particulars through the beauty of the summer season. And such was Egypt, and Syria, where, as I may say, all the stars are perpetually apparent, because clouds and rain are always far remote from that

part of the world… For, though it is difficult to discover without ambiguity all such particulars as the present, yet the <988a> hope is both beautiful and great, that the Greeks will reverence all these divinities with a more excellent mode of worship than that which they receive from the Barbarians, and that they will employ both discipline and the Delphic oracles, and every legitimate observance, for this purpose."

The most ancient documents relating to the Bible and the Greeks together do not go beyond the second half of the second millennium B.C. On the other hand, the oldest cuneiform texts, which are understandable and historically useful, are close to 3000 B.C. Furthermore these cuneiform documents have an impassable limit, because the oldest among them are close to the invention of writing, that took place here in Mesopotamia itself. It is written documents, only, that can provide us with a sure, precise, and analytic knowledge of our past. Beyond written history, historians of prehistory and archeologists can only provide a hazy and uncertain outline. That's why the famous Samuel Noah Kramer of the University of Pennsylvania titled his book: "History begins at Sumer."

This history, that is the history of Sumer and Akkad, is the history of the west, uninterrupted. In other words, the history of Mesopotamia is the continuation of the history of the ancestors of the western civilization, that is the history of the Israelites and the Greeks. The cuneiform documents of Mesopotamia not only provide us with a body of factual history anterior to those of Israel and Greece, which they later crosschecked and completed, but they also helped us reconstitute the Mesopotamian civilization. This was a civilization born in the fourth millennium, which reached adult age in the third millennium B.C. This is, maybe, the oldest civilization in the world, and merits this title of nobility. During all its existence, the Mesopotamian civilization has radiated knowledge around itself and has generously enriched its neighbors. It has done so more directly in the case of Israel, but in the case of Greece, through the Hittites and the peoples of Asia Minor, a people belonging to the civilizations that developed around the Aegean sea before the Dorian invasion of Greece, that is before the invasion that took place during the period 1100 and 1000 B.C.

That is why Mesopotamia has an organic place in the lineage of the western civilization. That is why, on the historic and genetic plan, where children are recognized by their fathers and the rivers by their sources, we cannot understand the past without going up to her, given we do not stall into Israel or Greece.

Scientific Thinking in Mesopotamia

                One of the characteristic features of the western civilization is the spirit of research in all the appropriate domains in order to extract the universal, permanent, necessary and the foreseeable knowledge from material objects. This was handed down to the west by the Greeks, but during the last two centuries, the western civilization has expanded, deepened and enriched their understanding of scientific knowledge, particularly, in the domain of experimentation.

Some historians have attributed this scientific thinking to Greeks, and when looking farther back into history, all the way back toward the east, they only see real technical progress, but no theoretical elaboration. For example, they say, Babylonia developed utilitarian calculations and land surveying, but Greeks alone derived the concepts of mathematics and geometry.

                But, for whoever has had a firsthand experience with the cuneiform documents, things look differently. Among some very old tablets, somehow undecipherable, they have come across some that can be characterized as Lists. These are the first works known as "scientific" in Mesopotamia. They are inventories of signs and words, properly classified on the basis of various criteria. In the beginning they were in Sumerian only, but later, another column was added to them in Akkadian. At first they were used as aids for the learning and mastery of the elements of writing. But later developments during the course of the history of the country show that their purpose was to classify objects, to draw up inventories of the many sectors of the highly intellectual world, that were both complete and reasoned.

One of the results of this ancient enterprise is a famous "encyclopedia", which was apparently compiled mainly during the first half of the second millennium, but is treating material that was well before that. It has close to ten thousand headings, and classifies the quasi-totality of the material universe, both in its natural state and as modified by the work of humans.

This encyclopedia includes the following:

·         All the trees and objects made of wood; the marsh plants and tools made of reed,

·         Vases made of clay,

·         Different metals and all the things that could be made from them,

·         Animals, both domestic and wild,

·         Parts of the body,

·         Stones and objects made of stone,

·         Non treelike plants,

·         Fish and fowl,

·         Fibers, fabrics, and dresses,

·         Anything concerning the face of the earth, like cities, places of habitation, mountains and water courses within and around the country,

·         Finally, anything whether natural or manufactured that served as food.

Human order, such as social classes, states, professions, trades etc were the subject of a similar index.

This remarkable literature of classification is the result of an enormous and constant intellectual effort by the Mesopotamians to understand the universe by classifying and ordering its contents, detailed by its common and specific features.

There are other literary works that testify, as rigorously, to this extraordinary determination to penetrate things beyond their appearances. For example there are about fifteen Dialogues that are from the turn of the third to the second millennium. This was a genre widely used in the country, which took the form of a literary contest, by confronting two objects, each taken as the prototype representing its species. Each was personalized and would take turn to reveal its qualities, advantages and prerogatives, until one was declared the winner. The dialogue would take place, for example, between Summer and Winter; the Bird and the Fish; the Tree and the Reed; Silver and Copper; the Bull and the Horse; the Hoe and the Plow; the Millstone and the Mortar[4].

By carefully evaluating these labels, we find out that, beyond this mental exercise and endemic passion for the "duel of prestige", there was, in the bottom, a real logical analysis of objects, always with the same concern to dissect, compare, classify and understand the things.

There are other works such as the "Treatises" or "Manuals" where this desire to know and understand is best manifested. These represent the vast majority of a reliable literature, consisting of tens of thousands of tablets. Each set of tablets is dedicated to one of the intellectual disciplines, with the exception of lexicography (dictionaries), grammar and philology (the study of literature and relevant fields), which were the subject of "Lists". Theology _ almost to the level of philosophy or metaphysics_ was partly consigned to the "Lists" and Catalogs, and partly as mythological stories.

Astronomy was partly included in "Lists", and partly dispersed in a great number of observations, reports and meticulous calculations. As for the part that has developed later, we can mention jurisprudence, wrongly called Codes of Law. Mathematics (arithmetic, geometry and algebra) were extremely advanced since the first half of the second millennium, of which are left amazing samples.

Diagnostic medicine was condensed in a major work made-up of forty tablets. Therapeutic medicine, which was technical, was treated separately.

                Divination, or more accurately, deductive divination, was based on the mythology they had constructed. Ancient Mesopotamians were persuaded that the world does not exist by itself, and that it must have been created and governed by supernatural beings. The model for these supernatural beings was sought in their political power structure, with the king at the top of a pyramid, followed by subordinates, whose authority emanated from the king. In other words, they transposed their political structure to the supernatural level, and from there they built their pantheon of gods and explained its mechanism.

Just as the king governed the country by direct orders or through his vicars, so did the gods rule the world with their plans, by deciding the fate of the people.

The kings used to announce their decisions by issuing written edicts, therefore, the gods, too, must issue their orders in a written form. Here comes the basis of divination, that is finding and reading the message of gods. We know that the cuneiform writing was based on pictography, that is using a picture to convey the idea of an object or an action, such as, for example, drawing a picture of the foot to mean the foot itself, the walking, or standing. From this analogy was born the idea that the writing of gods must be in the very things they create in order to make the world run, such as objects, animals, humans and celestial bodies. If these creations of gods were found to be normal and regular, as was the case most of the time, then the message, too, was understood to mean life as usual. But, when gods produced something extraordinary, unusual, not in conformity with its model, then this was understood as god's message for an unusual destiny. Of course, the message of gods had to be deciphered, interpreted and understood, just as was done with the pictograms of the original writing.

This was the foundation of deductive divination, that is finding the meaning in the messages of gods, written in events, or in objects, in order to forecast the destiny of the person involved. This could be the king, the country, or any individual.

                Just as the king might change his mind and forgive a given sentence, so was the case with the gods, they could be appeased and led to forgive. A number of prescriptions had been devised to incite gods to modify their verdict into a happier one, or less cruel than the original one.

Therefore, the essential thing in this procedure is a "deduction", a judgement, beginning with a given case and ending in a definition of the future.

For example, if a horse tried to mate with an ox, a rare and abnormal event, it was considered as a message from the gods to indicate a reduction in the growth of cattle. This was the omen communicated by the gods, and their decision, unless precautionary measures were taken to modify their decision.

                A careful and thorough analysis of the cuneiform archives reveals important facts. Since the first half of the second millennium B.C., at the latest, the learned men of antiquity had, with their way and rational and view of the world, discovered abstract thinking, analysis, deduction, research and the establishment of principles and laws. In a word, the essentials of the method and spirit of science, even if they saw and formulated them in their way, which is remote from ours.