Olympic Games (interesting, actually)

[Jona Lendering]

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.

Yes and no. Indeed, the Renaissance had a lot to do with "going back to before Rome". But any Renaissance author would say that before Greece, there was Babel and the Jews. It is only Winckelmann who creates a cultural theory that makes Greece, and not the Near East, the cradle of civilization. I like the guy -he's one of my heroes- and he has a case when you define culture as art and art as perfect imitation of the human anatomy. Fortunately, there is more to be said about civilization.

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?

I think that Paul-Alain Beaulieu, "De l’ Esagil au Mouseion: l’ organisation de la recherché scientifique au 4e siècle av. J.C." in: Pierre Briant en F. Joannès (eds.), La transition entre l’ empire achéménide et les royaumes hellénistiques (vers 350-200 avant J.-C.) (2006) is a reasonable and recent summary of mainstream scholarship. Although I admit that historians and archaeologists tend to be more open to ideas like Beaulieu's than classicists.

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,

I think that is incorrect. The development of System-A and System-B (= algebraic descriptions of planetary movements) is science as science, and has no religious implications. The same can be said for Babylonian mathematics - tablet Plimpton 322 shows an interest in mathematics that is purely scientific (twentieth century BC). As to my use of the word "algebra", which is usually not used before the Middle Ages, seer Jens Hoyrup, "Pythagorean 'Rule' and 'Theorem' - Mirror of the Relation between Babylonian and Greek Mathematics", in: Joh. Renger, Babylon. Focus mesopotamischer geschichte [etc], 1999 Saarbrucken.

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.

I know the story, but as far as I can remember, it's not from Herodotus. That being said, you are right that the "worship" of sporters is Greek - but that's not the issue. The issue is whether the Olympic Games, in its first stage, may not have had eastern influences. I think that the claim deserves serious study; it's not unlike other eastern influence - think of the "orientalizing style" in Greek painting, the use of eastern motifs by Herodotus, the use of the alphabeth, the introduction of sacred prostitution in Corinth.

[SigniferOne]

I know the story, but as far as I can remember, it's not from Herodotus. That being said, you are right that the "worship" of sporters is Greek - but that's not the issue. The issue is whether the Olympic Games, in its first stage, may not have had eastern influences. I think that the claim deserves serious study; it's not unlike other eastern influence - think of the "orientalizing style" in Greek painting, the use of eastern motifs by Herodotus, the use of the alphabeth, the introduction of sacred prostitution in Corinth.

If that's the argument, then it is far more intellectually supportable -- and at the same time for all intents and purposes irrelevant. If we talk about the orientalizing period in Greek art, the question is -- did it have any causative and fundamental relevance to the creation of the Discobolus and everything it means? Obviously no. Of course the Greeks took the alphabet from the East, they certainly had to take it from somewhere, and it would be silly to say they made it up from scratch because people simply don't work like that. But they went on to write and infuse infused into it ideals and literature that other people simply couldn't even dream about. So how relevant is the fact of the alphabet coming from the east to the subject and meaning of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics? That in fact, the proper word is actually "alphabeth"? Very obliquely. Only as a curious and meaningless little curiosity to bring up at cocktail parties.

Same with Olympics -- is it possible that the Babylonians or the Egyptians had events where people would throw one another, or run? Sure, there are Egyptian paintings of this. But the Greeks took this and infused ideals and hero-worship into it that made it completely unrecognizable from the original "parents". That's why I took so much offense at that GilgameshGames website, because it seeks to efface this fundamental infusion of Greek values:

"The revelation that the Olympian “jewel in the crownâ€

[Jona Lendering]

SigniferOne\\n[quote]That's why I took so much offense at that GilgameshGames website, because it seeks to efface this fundamental infusion of Greek values:

"The revelation that the Olympian “jewel in the crownâ€

[SigniferOne]

I am afraid you misquote me. If I may repeat myself:

We aim to show that civilisation evolved naturally at the confluence of three continenents rather than miraculously in the isolated mountainous terrain of Greece.

Impeccable, I'd say.

And yes, I think that this is impeccable - except, perhaps, for "isolated".

Oops, I'm sorry to have misquoted you. It was I who found the last paragraph of that website intolerable. But you didn't mention the problematic vitriole of that website in your blog, or in this thread, which could lead one to assume that you had no problem with it.

With so many skirmishers taking their aim at "Western civilization", this website and its authors are certainly not the scholars who should be taken with open arms. But as for the notion that Greece evolved naturally at the confluence of various civilizations before it, that is such a truism that I wouldn't have ever considered singling it out as impressive. I cannot imagine the claim that Classicists hold Greeks as miraculously springing from nothing, as anything other than a straw man. No Classicists have ever held that, and in the heyday of the Renaissance and Enlightenment everyone quite frequently, and quite uncontroversially, attributed the invention of the astrolabe to the Babylonians (following Herodotus) than to Anaximander, and attributed many other proto-scientific advances to non-Greeks besides it. The GilgameshGames website hinges on this straw man -- which only they made up -- to dismantle the artificial concept of Western civilization. That is scandalous and deserves the utmost opprobrium.

We may certainly attribute the invention of physical competition, as of walking, to the hoary civilizations prior to the Greek. Obviously. But we can attribute the invention of physical perfection and the worship of humanity only to the Greeks, thus making the core GilgameshGames argument inconsistent with the facts. I wish you would have mentioned this, when listing parts of the website you disagreed with.

[Jona Lendering]

But as for the notion that Greece evolved naturally at the confluence of various civilizations before it, that is such a truism that I wouldn't have ever considered singling it out as impressive. I cannot imagine the claim that Classicists hold Greeks as miraculously springing from nothing, as anything other than a straw man.

You're an optimist. I am afraid that there are a lot of old-fashioned classicists who do believe that it all started in Greece. And they are powerful; one of the drafts of the preambule to the European Constitution included a line about "drawing inspiration from Greece". A lot of pseudo-arguments (e.g., "yes the Babylonians knew the Pythagorean theorem, but the Greeks discovered its proof") are still around.

Worse, this image about the uniqueness of Greece is often repeated in the media; think only of Tom Holland's best-selling Persian Fire, which more or less says that if the Greeks had not won in 480-479, we would have no democracy, philosophy, science. (The theoretical debate, showing that this type of argument was nonsense, is more than a century old; go here.) The same sentiment can be found in Miller's 300, and in the movie based on 300. I am afraid you are very, very optimistic if you think that "the claim that Classicists hold Greeks as miraculously springing from nothing [is] a straw man".

As it stands, historians, archaeologists, and orientalists are bringing the Greek originality, which of course does exist (tragedy, architecture, Aristotle's Politics...), back to more normal proportions. But classicists have an impressive reputation for ignoring what's there.

As far as I am concerned, if secondary schools want to teach something about the origin of our civilization, they should give more attention to Babylon and Egypt, at the expense of Greece and Rome. 25/75 seems like a nice division. As long as classicists are not willing to give at least some room to orientalists, it is hypocritical if they say "yes we recognize that X, Y, and Z had antecedents in the east". You can not officially say A but teach B.

[SigniferOne]

You're an optimist. I am afraid that there are a lot of old-fashioned classicists who do believe that it all started in Greece.

Worse, this image about the uniqueness of Greece is often repeated in the media; think only of Tom Holland's best-selling Persian Fire, which more or less says that if the Greeks had not won in 480-479, we would have no democracy, philosophy, science.

...

As far as I am concerned, if secondary schools want to teach something about the origin of our civilization, they should give more attention to Babylon and Egypt, at the expense of Greece and Rome. 25/75 seems like a nice division. As long as classicists are not willing to give at least some room to orientalists, it is hypocritical if they say "yes we recognize that X, Y, and Z had antecedents in the east". You can not officially say A but teach B.

I don't understand. Maybe we're speaking past each other here. Haven't I been arguing for Greek exceptionalism? I would be the first to say that if the Greeks hadn't won the Persian Wars, we would have no democracy, philosophy, or science. What's wrong with saying that? Or, what's wrong with saying that without the Greek worship of mankind, we would not have the Olympics as we think of it today? I think that is an entirely accurate statement of the Greek patrimony. It's as I was saying before, someone before the Greeks invented walking -- obviously -- but that is no detriment to the ideals which the Greeks did uniquely infuse. We don't idealize walking, and thereby honor some primordial culture (not Greeks) which invented that. We idealize fitness, beautiful people, six-packs and toned biceps, ideals that do go back straight to the Greeks and not before. In other words, there aren't any chiseled and man-worshiping ideals in Gilgamesh; if the Greeks hadn't developed the Olympics, the Persians or the Babylonians wouldn't have. Why? Because in thousands of years they hadn't*. Plus, those parts of the world without contact with the Greek legacy, say China, had no conception of athletics or medical science until the 19th century, when they were taught about it by the Greek-taught Europeans. So it is very fair to say that had the Greek achievement been destroyed, humanity would most likely be lacking it in everyone else. But the Greeks didn't invent everything; if the Romans were destroyed, the world wouldn't have the concept of 'republic', because the Greeks certainly hadn't achieved it. And so it goes, civilizations build on top of one another. It just so happens that the ideals we hearken back to and idealize as the most important to us, were founded by the Greeks and Romans, and no one else before that (and even since).


* Babylonians needed thousands of years and still didn't have Hipparchus, while the Greeks just took a couple of decades or at most a century, and surpassed the Babylonians in fundamental (rather than just incremental) leaps and bounds.

[Sean Manning]

Signifer, do you know that as far as we can tell, some form of democracy was not uncommon in the earlies days of civilization? At least, we see little evidence of a wealthy and privileged class from many early sites. There are hints of this in later sources; for example, the Gilgamesh legend has a senate and a popular assembly, even if King Gilgamesh dominates them. Government in many tribal societies, such as the eighteenth-century Iroquois or various Germanic peoples, has democratic elements. The Greeks were simply the first people to write about democracy, and even their writers spend most of their energy criticizing it. And what makes you think that Greece being under moderate foreign rule would destroy Greek culture, anyways?

The Greeks were a remarkable people, who invented and improved many great things, but we have to be careful not to give them credit for things which they were just the first to tell us about.

Jona, could you summarize that French article on a 'scientific academy' in Babylon? I'm skeptical, but I don't yet read French.

[Jona Lendering]

I would be the first to say that if the Greeks hadn't won the Persian Wars, we would have no democracy, philosophy, or science. What's wrong with saying that?

That it's a counterfactual argument, which is the historical equivalent of an illicit appeal. Holland suspends the rules of logic for the benefit of classicism. And he knows, or his advisers ought to know: the debate between Weber and Meyer is a classic.

Jona, could you summarize that French article on a 'scientific academy' in Babylon? I'm skeptical, but I don't yet read French.

You have every right, yes even a duty, to be skeptical. However, summarizing it right now is a bit more than I can do at the moment.

One of the strongest arguments for a connection between Babylonian and Alexandrine science is that the Babylonians tried to describe the celestial motions in algebraical terms. This is something we see again in Alexandria. There is little in Greece to prepare for that. We know that Pythagoras had an interest in mathematics, but the sources do not mention mathematical astronomy - and besides, they are too young to be helpful; the Pythagorean Theorem is never connected to the Samian Sage until the fourth century AD. Plato was interested in mathematics too, but never realized that you could use it to describe the planetary motions. That really is a Babylonian invention, which was picked up in Alexandria.

In the second place, please note that Alexander, after conquering Babylon, ordered the scientific literature to be translated into Greek; this is known from a very late Greek source, Simplicius; but the truth of his words is established because Simplicius correctly translates the Babylonian title of the Astronomical Diaries, massartu, as têrêseis, which is illogical in Greek but keeps the double meaning of 'guarding' and 'observing'. (The Arabian scientist Ibn Khaldun, who used other sources, tells the same.) The Callipean Calendar Reform took place ten months after the conquest of Babylon.

Finally, it is easy to overlook what is most obvious: nowhere in the Greek world was a state-sponsored scientific institution. Ptolemy knew Babylonia's Esagila, which had no less than fourteen sponsored astronomers, and must have decided to create something like that in his capital.

I think the first and second point are really proved, the third one is a plausible hypothesis. I hope this helps.

[SigniferOne]

Jona, you say on your website that the Chaldaeans, who are infamous in mainstream Classics and History as the first and greatest purveyors of charlatanism and superstition, were the first scientists in history? And that the Greek science was actually learned from them? Again, those are some very striking and controversial statements, far out of the mainstream; they cannot be taken as an established fact until other scholars have their go at them, and either change their opinions or demonstrate the error in yours. But it certainly shouldn't be stated plainly and uncontroversially, as if there was nothing shocking in them. I certainly didn't expect www.livius.org to contain such controversial material.

In addition to all that, the Library of Alexandria had very little to do with astronomy (or astrology which was the province of the Chaldaeans). Its main emphasis was in mathematics, in applied engineering, in zoology and botanology (along with the literary criticism).

When I spoke of Greek exceptionalism, you brought up Holland. I'm not sure what you were referring to, but my conclusions were arrived at first-hand. What did he have to do with it?

But anyway, we're straying a bit from the original topic of the Olympics. I think that every reasonable person will accept that the Greeks were not the first practitioners of physical exercise; but you latch on to this fact to immediately ipso facto state that all of our connotations with athletics stem from it. This is contrary to the facts. Our views towards athletics stem from the Greeks. These views were dead in the West during the Middle Ages, and were only revived in the Renaissance by people deeply versed in the Greek and Roman Classics. No other society in the world produced such an intense admiration for the human body, yes not even the Babylonians; and as a result any connection between Gilgamesh and our Olympics is tangential at best. Just as, any connection between Aristotle's science and the origins of his language is coincidental at best -- and for all intents and purposes meaningless.

Signifer, do you know that as far as we can tell, some form of democracy was not uncommon in the earlies days of civilization? At least, we see little evidence of a wealthy and privileged class from many early sites. There are hints of this in later sources; for example, the Gilgamesh legend has a senate and a popular assembly, even if King Gilgamesh dominates them. Government in many tribal societies, such as the eighteenth-century Iroquois or various Germanic peoples, has democratic elements.

I think what you mean to say is that the Germanics and the Iroquois had tribal elements. These certainly were not conscious political institutions, explicitly deliberated and chosen into law.

The fact of the matter is that many tribal/pre-civilized societies had groups of elders, chiefs, etc. That is a fact stemming from their lack of strong social/national forces, not from libertarian/republican ideals. Every society by inertia begins with some tribal elements, and then ossifies into a centralized monarchy. Europeans in the middle ages had very fractured nations, with fiefdoms, little petty kingdoms, a King which had power over nothing, a necessary council with his leading Nobles, etc. The German Empire even had electors choosing an emperor. But no sensitive observer would say that the Holy Roman Empire was a source of ideals and a bastion of liberty. Anyhow, we're straying from our thread again.

[Sergey Lenkov]

OK. First an apology for bringing up the Olympic Games, with which you're probably as fed up as I am. Still, this link leads to a webpage that may actually be interesting.

It is, somewhat misleadingly, called Gilgamesh Games. The author of those pages suggests that the Olympic Games have roots in ancient Mesopotamia, and points at a key text from Babylonia: the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was known throughout the ancient Near East and has jumped to Greece as well (it is quoted by Homer and referred to by Aelian, who also knows the name of "Gilgamos").

Maybe I'm misunderstood something - please, enlighten me about Homerian quotation from Gilgamesh :?:

[Jona Lendering]

Jona, you say on your website that the Chaldaeans, who are infamous in mainstream Classics and History as the first and greatest purveyors of charlatanism and superstition, were the first scientists in history?

Yes, that's exactly what has been established as communis opinio. The Chaldaean procedure of observation, establishing regularities, checking and falsification/corroboration is, by any standard, scientific. Read Neugebauer, who showed in the 1930s that it was science as science - not a byproduct of religious speculation. A good summary is R.J. van der Spek in "Darius III, Alexander the Great and Babylonian Scholarship" in: Achaemenid History 13 (2003) 289-346.

That Greek and Latin authors, and 19th-century classicists, maintain that the Chaldaeans were charlatans, is irrelevant. We don't believe their remarks about, say, slaves or women or Germanic tribes either.

And that the Greek science was actually learned from them?

Yes. Read Beaulieu for a summary. The evidence is unambiguous (Simplicius, the Calippean Calendar reform; or take a look at the Astronomical Canon - why should a Greek scientist use Babylonian dating formulas if he had not first obtained Babylonian observations and theories?). Even Lane Fox mentions this in his book on Alexander the Great - which is from the early 1970s. Or, if you prefer a book devoted to the history of science (and not a biography of Alexander): try Pigot's Naissance de la science (1991). By any standards, this is mainstream scholarship, although some classicists may have ignored it - and I suspect that people like Holland still have a thing or two to learn.

You seem to find it difficult to accept that this is the communis opinio. I do not know what you find convincing after I have given you all references you need. Can you give me references to recent publications by authors who understand both Babylonian and Greek science and deny that Babylon was scientific or deny its influence on Greece?

Maybe I'm misunderstood something - please, enlighten me about Homerian quotation from Gilgamesh :?:

I'll check; I will reply tomorrow.

[SigniferOne]

You seem to find it difficult to accept that this is the communis opinio. I do not know what you find convincing after I have given you all references you need. Can you give me references to recent publications by authors who understand both Babylonian and Greek science and deny that Babylon was scientific or deny its influence on Greece?

All of the Loebs I have read, always footnote the Chaldaeans as astrologers (and never as astronomers), and charlatans. I have read a whole host of books on the Empire where commentators always lambast the later Empire, and the Neoplatonists, for bringing the Chaldaean superstition to the fore. I'm sorry it's been years and I don't have names at t the moment, so we may rest it as unsettled; but if you wish I'll keep appending mentions of Chaldaeans to this thread as I keep finding them, since they are universally unfavorable in every book which I have read.

Yes, that's exactly what has been established as communis opinio. The Chaldaean procedure of observation, establishing regularities, checking and falsification/corroboration is, by any standard, scientific.

I'm sorry there's one further requirement for something to be science -- it has to be true. You may be missing a distinction between science and pseudo-science -- both contain observation, establish regularities, but one does have connection with truth and reality, while the other one doesn't. Chaldaeans were not these disinterested astronomic scientists, measuring and recording the movements of the planets. They sought to predict the future and to tell horoscopes. It doesn't matter how well and conscientiously they collected their data; their task was still pseudo-science.

[Jona Lendering]

All of the Loebs I have read, always footnote the Chaldaeans as astrologers (and never as astronomers), and charlatans.

If you study, for example, Manichaeism, what would you do: read a Christian text or a tractate written by a Manichaean? I think you will prefer the second option. So, if you want to know something about Babylonian science, it is better not to read Greek sources, and read Babylonian texts.

Besides, many Loebs are pretty old. They are often already out of copyright. (I happen to know this as I am currently proofreading a web edition of Diodorus.) You really can not take the Loeb as a summary of the communis opinio. For decades, the Tusculum and Budé series were better; Loeb is now often replacing old translations by new ones (e.g., Philostratus' Life of Apollonius) and is rapidly improving.

As the Loebs are often old, the judgment of the translaters/commenters is often just a repeat of the ancient sources - which are unreliable. If you read Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, Lucian, and Porphyry - can you deduce anything about Judaism or Christianity? Of course not. You will immediately see that they are biased against unRoman wisdom. The same applies to Chaldaeans. The Greeks and Romans could not read cuneiform texts (although Iamblichus still learned "ta Babyloniaka" in the third century CE; I wonder what he was referring to).

The Greeks and Romans often did not even understand the difference between eastern wisdoms. Matthew 2.1 (visit of the wise men) is a case in point, where astrologoi or mathematikoi or Chaldaioi would be relevant, the evangelist says Magoi, which is certainly incorrect. (Magians are prayer assistents from Iran; the other three expressions refer to the sky-gazing futurologists that might indeed be interested in a strange star.)

There was one big surge of translations during the reigns of Alexander, Seleucus Nicator and Ptolemy Soter - and that was sufficient to change the face of Greek science. After that, they forgot, and all types of foreign wisdom were lumped together and regarded with suspicion. Pliny's history of magic (NH, book 30) is a case in point.

here's one further requirement for something to be science -- it has to be true. ... Chaldaeans were not these disinterested astronomic scientists, measuring and recording the movements of the planets. They sought to predict the future and to tell horoscopes. It doesn't matter how well and conscientiously they collected their data; their task was still pseudo-science.

By this definition, there's no Greek science either. Ptolemy considered his Tetrabiblos as his main work, which is an astrological treatise. Pliny, Plato, Aristotle, Strabo: they would all go down the drain if you use this definition, because they all believed in celestial omens. Kepler and Newton would, by this definition, not be scientists either.

Incidentally, it may be noted that the Chaldaeans of the seventh century BC were aware that their discipline was probably based on an erroneous assumption. The Omen Catalog (Enuma Anu Enlil, published by Erica Reiner in the 1990s) contains tablets of predictions that used to be true and were now refuted. After this, they continued their project, which was by now purely scientific, as I have already suggested in earlier postings (and see Neugebauer's opera omnia).

The first horoscopes, and the revitalizing of futurology, date from the fifth century; oddly enough, these can not be connected to the Chaldaeans. After, say, 300, we see horoscopes becoming more popular, in both Babylonia and the rest of the Hellenistic world.

I think we have the same development that we see in the second century AD: even though the foundations of something scientific have been laid, people move back to magic - in Babylonia, in the Graeco-Roman world. Eric Dodds wrote an interesting chapter about that, "The Fear of Freedom", in The Greeks and the Irrational. I don't know if I can still agree with Dodds' theory that people abhor from the total freedom of a world without gods and providence, but it is worth a thought - if only because it seems such an acurate description of our own world.

Maybe I'm misunderstood something - please, enlighten me about Homerian quotation from Gilgamesh :?:

I'll check; I will reply tomorrow.

Well, make that today. I was wrong: it's not the Epic of Gilgamesh that is being quoted by Homer, but the Babylonian Creation Epic (Enuma Enlil). It's Iliad 14.200-201, 246, 301-302; Oceanus and Tethys playing the roles of Apsu and Tiamat.

[SigniferOne]

There was one big surge of translations during the reigns of Alexander, Seleucus Nicator and Ptolemy Soter - and that was sufficient to change the face of Greek science.

Could you show me how this surge of Babylonian translations changed Aristotle's science, or the Botany of Theophrastus? Or the historiography of Thucydides and Ephorus? Did something in these translations have to do with the mathematics or inventions of Archimedes? With the engineering of Heron? I simply fail to see this dramatic revolutionizing of Greek science which you attribute to the Babylonians. The Greeks instituted something completely alien and different from the Babylonian view of the universe; even those scientists who dealt with traditionally Babylonian subjects -- astronomy and heavens -- completely revolutionized and set on a scientific footing what was heretofore pseudo-scientific and superstitious theorizing. I really think your pursuit of origins goes deeper into the past than facts dictate. Our efforts about "origins" are better spent learning about Heron, Ephorus, and Hipparchus, and about the cultural revolution they instituted. But to each his own I guess.

By this definition, there's no Greek science either. Ptolemy considered his Tetrabiblos as his main work, which is an astrological treatise. Pliny, Plato, Aristotle, Strabo: they would all go down the drain if you use this definition, because they all believed in celestial omens. Kepler and Newton would, by this definition, not be scientists either.

Whether or not Ptolemy considered his Tetrabiblios to be the most important, is to my mind less relevant, because what is unquestionable is that it's his Almagest and Geography that stand out as the two monumental, gigantic monuments to science; they are some of the most influential and important books in all of history. So the books he wrote on science, were scientific. The books which were on pseudo-science, were not. Is there a problem with making that distinction?

Same with any ancient author who believed in celestial omens -- to the extent that these beliefs played into that author's larger ideas, to that extent this author was not a father of science; to the extent that his ideas were rational and based on truth, he was. Thus we revere Aristotle's physical and metaphysical works regardless of their factual mistakes, but completely disdain to read the Neoplatonists.

Newton and Kepler are no different. Newton had both scientific and pseudo-scientific interests. The Principia is not an astrological work, and is a monument of modern science. Some of his studies into astrology and the numerology of the Bible, are not. Same with Kepler: he never chose to emphasize his views on astrology to the extent of writing any of them down; there is evidence to suggest that he was progressively suspicious of his hobby as time went on. Either way, fact is that the only works he wrote down are scientific in character, and thereby he is a great scientist.

Such this is the winding path by which we went from a narrow discussion about Greek Olympics to the very foundation of what the West is and what antiquity means to us. If you are perpetually prepared to see the fundamental, rather than incidental, roots for the Western world in Babylonia and the East, you won't be surprised and may even take up with open arms the proposition that the Olympics is fundamentally an Eastern idea. But if you were to believe that the Greeks infused something fundamentally new into the subjects they touched, and it is this 'newness' that forms the characteristic aspect of Western civilization, then it would be impossible to find in the "Gilgamesh Games" that spirit and that hero-worship which in truth belongs to the Greek Olympics alone.

[Sean Manning]

Thanks for the information, Jona. I'll have to read that article when I learn French; thanks for kinding providing some of the main points.

I think what you mean to say is that the Germanics and the Iroquois had tribal elements. These certainly were not conscious political institutions, explicitly deliberated and chosen into law.

The fact of the matter is that many tribal/pre-civilized societies had groups of elders, chiefs, etc. That is a fact stemming from their lack of strong social/national forces, not from libertarian/republican ideals. Every society by inertia begins with some tribal elements, and then ossifies into a centralized monarchy. Europeans in the middle ages had very fractured nations, with fiefdoms, little petty kingdoms, a King which had power over nothing, a necessary council with his leading Nobles, etc. The German Empire even had electors choosing an emperor. But no sensitive observer would say that the Holy Roman Empire was a source of ideals and a bastion of liberty. Anyhow, we're straying from our thread again.

Signifer, I disagree with many of the things you are saying, but I will try to avoid expanding this discussion even further. Centralized monarchies do rise ... and then they break down into smaller kingdoms, with towns and remote areas often effectively self-governing. Rome, or the medieval German empire, is a good example of that. Germanic peoples were quite conscious that law was formed by communal tradition, as tested by the consensus of the fighting men, and that their chiefs had specific and limited powers. See the lists of laws which they were kind enough to write down, or the analysis in Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution (1983). Have a look at Icelandic literature for proof that one group of Germanic peoples (the Norse) were very aware of what liberties they had and their value. The Iroquois quite deliberately organized a state out of a loose tribal confederacy, and if it evolved over time so does any state. I think that the stuff on the Gilgamesh Games site is much overstated, but so are some of the claims of Greek exceptionalism which they attack.