This seems too partial to me. Admitting Egyptian or Nubian influences as starting points, or Mesopotamian as starting points, denies that those civilizations were also influenced by others. What the greeks did was considerably more than simply transmit what they received from others. By the end of the classical period greek philosophy was preserved and then transmitted by arab scholars, who themselves carried it through spain to western Europe—over a very long period of time. None of this was simply accomplished without new scholars absorbing the knowledge, rewriting, rethinking, recasting, reterritorializing it. I believe all knowledge works that way, then and now, across all of human history, in all disciplines.
More or less.
I also think it works like language. If you say that we speak a Germanic or romance or semitic or indo-european or afro-asiatic tongue, it is not the same tongue as that spoken a thousand, much less two thousand, years ago. The language is absorbed by its speakers, transmuted over time and distance, and becomes gradually different. How is music or the arts or sciences any different?
I understand the desire to claim a point of origin, but that originary thinking always precludes the possibility that something came before…for everything that is human.
I don't mean to say knowledge isn't also lost. Knowledge of concrete, mastered by the romans, was forgotten, lost for a thousand years. But other things changed and developed in amazing ways, at the same time, like music.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 2 March 2018 at 18:39
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - NIGERIA'S LITERATE ZOMBIES
I fully agree with Fakinlede.
Nubian-Egyptian culture from ancient northeast Africa was such a dominant factor in the education of the Greeks and Romans. This becomes an avenue for the global penetration of their ideas.
I fuse Nubia and Egypt for specific reasons. The Nubians influenced Egypt and vice versa.In fact hieroglyphics itself was of Nubian origin according to scholar/travelers like Diodorus Siculus and even the archeological record. There are also many examples of Nubian artifacts and techniques being classified as Egyptian.
Developments in the sciences, including medicine, would be borrowed by the Greeks from this region and so, too, aspects of mathematics and astronomy. You only have to read Herodotus, Aristotle and others to see this point. The Greeks were not shy in acknowledging their debt to the scholars of the region. The point is that much of Greek knowledge, though not all, was of northeast African origin and this spread around the world through multiple avenues.By the way Alexander was actually a destroyer of knowledge. Recall that he burnt the Egyptian libraries.
I would also consider ancient Iraq (Mesopotamia) as a significant area with global influence with respect to astronomy and maths.
Around 600 BC, before the emergence of Greek philosophers and scientists such as Thales and others, Indian scientists such as Kanada, Susruta and others were active. I believe they influenced the Greeks too. Alexander got into the picture around 300 BC.
Once you do a careful timeline, things fall into place.
You have the real father of medicine, Imhotep emerging around 2700 BC. Hippocrates emerges more than two thousand years later but helps to
spread Imhotep's ideas about medicine- including his stethoscope, medical devices and medical code of behavior to Europe.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
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