Olympic Games (interesting, actually)

[SigniferOne]

I could add more (the Museum in Alexandria is a copy of the scientific institute of Babylon, for example), but will leave it at this. What I am trying to say is that the real revolution was made by Winckelmann and became institutionalized by Wilhelm von Humboldt. What the authors of that Gilgamesh Games website are doing is essentially a counterrevolution that ought to have happened about a century ago.

Surely this is incorrect on many levels. If by Winckelmann you refer to Iohann Winckelmann of the mid 18th century, then he started no such Greek/Latin primacy project, because that has been in existence since the 14th century. That's what the whole Renaissance is about -- searching, and finding, in the Classics, the source for a lot of the wisdom that people then took and transformed in their daily lives. That's why the greatest Greek and Latin books are called "The Classics".

It's also somewhat surprising to see you, who maintains such a respected scholarly site named after a Roman author, stating so blaze that the Alexandrian Library was a "copy", and that the Babylonians had a "scientific institute". First of all no mainstream scientists believe this, so if you have some proof, then shouldn't the claim be stated a lot more circumspectly than it has been? Instead of declarations, it would be far more supportable to suggest evidence and wait from criticism to see whether it passes any muster. Secondly, this notion is certainly false, because the Babylonians or anyone else never had science, in the modern sense in which the Greeks had invented it. They collected astronomical data for religious purposes, and they were never able to put it to scientific use for thousands of years, while Hipparchus in a spare stretch of a few decades surpassed all of Babylonian knowledge of the previous 1000 years.

Finally about the Olympics -- there is a very simple reason why the Babylonians could not have them. I am not saying that some form of sports didn't exist there, because it certainly existed in Egypt. But sports in the modern sense as we know them, the pinnacle of human perfection and chiseled gorgeous athletes with glistening six-packs -- were invented only by the Greeks and by nobody else. There's a famous story in Herodotus how when the Spartans defeated a Persian squadron, they stripped them down to search for hidden items, and, tanned and chiseled as they were, beheld the sight of flabby, pale-skinned "soldiers". I think the historian records that they actually started laughing.