Olympic Games (interesting, actually)

[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.