COLOR: African Contributions to Greek Culture and Science

African Contributions
to Greek Culture & Science

The ancient Egyptians were possibly the first civilisation to practice the scientific arts. The word chemistry is derived from the word Alchemy which is the ancient name for Egypt.

The lure of trade was important for ancient civilizations. Egypt served as a meeting place for people from Africa, the Medditeran, Asia and Europe. There were several transdesert routes between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea, which linked the civilizations of the Mediterranean with those of the Indian Ocean.

Alexander the Great went to Egypt as a foreign invader and trader who instructed his soldiers to marry the native people. The Greeks benefited immensely from the possession of Egyptian knowledge, gold, technology and other resources. They also benefited by controlling trade routes in the area (see Map of Greek Trade Routes).

Greek were great borrowers of Egyptian knowledge and technology. The Greeks credited their learning of mathematics, geometry and medicine to Egypt. They adopted an Egyptian calendar, and even Hippocratic medicine, which is generally regarded as highly rational, was institutionally centered on the religious cult of Asclepius and his serpents, which was practiced earlier in Egypt.

The Greeks were told about many of the Great Pyramid's extraordinary features and they believed the Egyptians were the first mathematicians and astronomers. The vast majority of Greek scientists, astronomers, and mathematics chose to study or spent time in Egypt rather than Mesopotamia. Thales, Pythagoras, and Plato went to study in Egypt during the last half of the first millennium BC.

Euclid, considered the "father" of mathematics, taught at the school in Alexandria at the beginning of the Ptolemaic period. There is no evidence to suggest that Euclid was anything other than Egyptian. Eudoxos, the greatest mathematician of Greece, spent many years in Egypt, fifty years earlier, and was compelled to learned Egyptian to study mathematics and astronomy. Based on his study with Egyptian priests and astronomers, Eudoxos developed an astronomical view of the heavens as a system of concentric, spinning spheres.

In fact, most of the great "Greek" scientists wrote in Greek but lived in Egypt, and many may have been Egyptian, for example, Euclid, the inventor Heron, the mathematician Diophantos, Theon and his daughter Hypatia.

Ptolemaic Period Math Texts

Euclid's fame is based on his thirteen major texts, The Elements, a series of logical deduction of theorems from accepted definitions and axioms. For over 2,000 years, these books dominated the teaching of mathematics.

Ptolemy's fame is based on his 13 books, The Almagest, (the Greatest in Arabic) which dominated astronomy until Copernicus' theory of a sun-centered planetary system (1543 AD). This text describe the epicycle system of an earth-centered astronomy and contain a catalogue of 1,028 stars, and the foundations of spherical trignometry.

Heron wrote Metrica on geometric measurement, and Pneumatica, a book about machines. Diophantus continued the tradition of Egyptian algebra. In Arithmetica, he expanded on number theory and introduced brief symbols to simplify algebraic expressions.

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