midnight Target: It was the Arabs that saved whatever was saved from the Ionians. If it werent for Al- Gabar, Gerber and others we would have never heard of the great Greek Philosophers.
Right - untill one of them said "if the books contradict Koran, they are evil and if they confirm Koran, they are redundant, burn them all..." You have a very simplistic view of christianity or arab culture as being uniform and static.
The greek philosophers' works passed through quite a lot of hands before it got to us.
Huge strides were made in science that were lost with the Library. A heliocentric solar system for example, which waited 1100 years to be "discovered" by Copurnicus.
Oh, yea - as if there was any urgent need for it. As soon as trade developed and ships appeared that required more precise navigation, the heliocentric system was promptly rediscovered as well as other usefull things. And it was not Copernicus who offered it to western civilisation - but scientists few decades later. Guess there was not much urgency after all.
Besides, why do you think I ever ment greek philosopher's ramblings that contributed to our civilisation? If anything, they greatly delayed and diverted search for knowlege of christian world because they got accepted as true. Discovery of the way around Africa was delayed by centuries because of Aristotel's maps. Same with his otehr ideas.
They were interesting but false - their ideas of society, geography etc.
Those guys understood the cause of their civilisation greatness - individualism, democracy, property, competition, profit, free trade, development even less that modern socialists do. They hated and denigraded all of those things.
They promoted self-dependence and collectivism and governmental control and statism even though Greece rose on it's trade and has it's large population only becasue of shipments of bread from Egypt and materials from as far away as british isles.
In fact the periods of development of ancient greeks were several times brough to ruin when state achieved enough power and started interfering with economy and free markets.
Of course it's the politicians and their close circles that leave their version of history rather than traders and shippers and craftsmen.
The laws that reflect existing morals and traditions are attributed to rulers ()"lawgivers") who's only role was ordering those to be inscribed in madium that could survive to be discovered.
Modern historians often fall for that and declare strong state to be paramount of the civilisation development where it was the cause of it's demise.
Civilisations experienced great busts in development once state developed just strong enough - or deteriorated to be weak enough to only ensure relative safety of property and trade and leave people alone. As soon as the states strengthened further, they started regulating production and distribution and securing the sources and markets and stifled the only engine of discovery and development ever to exist - competition.
It's the greek's society's basic morals, values and traditions that we inherited and developed, not obsolete or flase knowlege or even curious but unusable insights.
miko
