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The Roots of Western Civilization
And
Scientific Thinking Before Greece1
Looking beyond the recognized sources of western civilization, namely Israel of the Bible and
ancient Greece, one can see in the remote horizons of history, the original civilization that nurtured both,
each in its particular way. This ancient civilization that nourished the apparent sources of western
civilization, is ancient Mesopotamia, the country of Sumer and Akkad, Babylon and Nineveh.
Here it is important to mention that to single out Sumer as the sole country is not accurate, as this was a
Sumero-Akkadian civilization, not to mention other prehistoric peoples, which are not clearly defined.
The western civilization was inaugurated and launched by Christianity, which in turn, was at the
junction of two ideological currents, namely, the Biblical ideology on the one hand, and the GrecoHellenistic2 on the other. By this double alliance, the western civilization became a remote tributary of the
Sumerians and Babylonians, who, thus become the oldest discernable ancestors of the western civilization,
in a direct ascending line. From very far, Mesopotamians are part of the family of the western civilization,
part of its past.
Many people, today, don't think of going beyond what the Bible teaches about our oldest ancestors of the
Israelite branch, they don't want to talk about our very first beginnings.
After the "Peace of Callias" in 449 BC it was possible for Greeks to travel freely through Persia,
and Democritus (460-370 BC), the Greek philosopher central to the development of the atomic theory of
the universe, seized the opportunity and from Egypt passed on to Babylonia. At this time the term Chaldean
had been specialized to mean a wise man. Democritus summed up his studies in Babylonia in a book titled
the "Chaldean Treatise." Another treatise was entitled "On the Sacred Writings of those in Babylon",
meaning the Babylonian cuneiform. Democritus came across a tablet containing the sayings of the wise
Ahiqar, one of which told of a pig who went to the bath with a gentleman; when it came out, it saw a mud
hole and wallowed in it. Democritus is the first Greek scientist known to have visited Babylon in person.
How great was the scientific harvest brought back from this virgin field may be learned from his extant
fragments and from the list of his writings. The group of his writings headed Mathematics seems more
promising. His astronomical treatises can be explained only in terms of Babylonian tablets.
He began with a four part work describing the heavens, the earth, the pole, and light rays or meteorology.
Babylonian astronomers had already divided the concave celestial sphere into three concentric zones: "The
Way of Anu", god of the sky above the Pole where revolved the "stars which see the Pole and never set";
"The Way of Enlil," god of the atmosphere, which the Greeks were to call the ecliptic and still later the
Zodiac; and "The Way of Ea," god of the deep, far down in the celestial ocean. With the "Uranography,"
which we can restore almost completely from Vitruvius (first century BC, Roman architect and engineer),
went a number of "planispheres," on which were pictured, in imitation of Babylonian terms, the human and
animal figures which have come to represent the constellations. 3
As to the other branch, namely the Hellenic branch, no one with a sound mind would adhere to the famous
"miracle", according to which the Greeks suddenly appeared in a world of anthropoids, and invented and
created everything out of nothing. Still, many unconsciously stick to a similarly extravagant doctrine. But,
by so doing, they do not feel the least need to go beyond their Greek superhumans, to search for their
origins in the direction of these "Barbarians", whom the author of the Epinomis (987a-988a) was, with
some respect, directing them. The Epinomis is one of Plato's works (born 428/427; died 348/347 B.C.). The
work is in the form of a dialogue between three persons. In the course of the dialogue, mention is made to
non-Greek origins of astronomical knowledge, as follows: "But the reason <987a> of this is, because a
Barbarian was the first spectator of these. For an ancient region is the nurse of those who first understood
these particulars through the beauty of the summer season. And such was Egypt, and Syria, where, as I
may say, all the stars are perpetually apparent, because clouds and rain are always far remote from that
1
Based on Jean Bottéro, Mésopotamie, L'écriture, la raison et les Dieux (Éditions Gallimard, 1987)
By this term is meant the Greek language mixed with Hebraism, spoken by hellenizing Jews, and
covering a period beginning with the death of Alexander the great and ending with the Roman conquest of
Alexandria, in the first century B.C.
3
A.T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London,
1959), pages 332 to 334
2
2
part of the world… For, though it is difficult to discover without ambiguity all such particulars as the
present, yet the <988a> hope is both beautiful and great, that the Greeks will reverence all these divinities
with a more excellent mode of worship than that which they receive from the Barbarians, and that they will
employ both discipline and the Delphic oracles, and every legitimate observance, for this purpose."
The most ancient documents relating to the Bible and the Greeks together do not go beyond the
second half of the second millennium B.C. On the other hand, the oldest cuneiform texts, which are
understandable and historically useful, are close to 3000 B.C. Furthermore these cuneiform documents
have an impassable limit, because the oldest among them are close to the invention of writing, that took
place here in Mesopotamia itself. It is written documents, only, that can provide us with a sure, precise, and
analytic knowledge of our past. Beyond written history, historians of prehistory and archeologists can only
provide a hazy and uncertain outline. That's why the famous Samuel Noah Kramer of the University of
Pennsylvania titled his book: "History begins at Sumer."
This history, that is the history of Sumer and Akkad, is the history of the west, uninterrupted. In other
words, the history of Mesopotamia is the continuation of the history of the ancestors of the western
civilization, that is the history of the Israelites and the Greeks. The cuneiform documents of Mesopotamia
not only provide us with a body of factual history anterior to those of Israel and Greece, which they later
crosschecked and completed, but they also helped us reconstitute the Mesopotamian civilization. This was
a civilization born in the fourth millennium, which reached adult age in the third millennium B.C. This is,
maybe, the oldest civilization in the world, and merits this title of nobility. During all its existence, the
Mesopotamian civilization has radiated knowledge around itself and has generously enriched its neighbors.
It has done so more directly in the case of Israel, but in the case of Greece, through the Hittites and the
peoples of Asia Minor, a people belonging to the civilizations that developed around the Aegean sea before
the Dorian invasion of Greece, that is before the invasion that took place during the period 1100 and 1000
B.C.
That is why Mesopotamia has an organic place in the lineage of the western civilization. That is why, on
the historic and genetic plan, where children are recognized by their fathers and the rivers by their sources,
we cannot understand the past without going up to her, given we do not stall into Israel or Greece.
Scientific Thinking in Mesopotamia
One of the characteristic features of the western civilization is the spirit of research in all the
appropriate domains in order to extract the universal, permanent, necessary and the foreseeable knowledge
from material objects. This was handed down to the west by the Greeks, but during the last two centuries,
the western civilization has expanded, deepened and enriched their understanding of scientific knowledge,
particularly, in the domain of experimentation.
Some historians have attributed this scientific thinking to Greeks, and when looking farther back into
history, all the way back toward the east, they only see real technical progress, but no theoretical
elaboration. For example, they say, Babylonia developed utilitarian calculations and land surveying, but
Greeks alone derived the concepts of mathematics and geometry.
But, for whoever has had a firsthand experience with the cuneiform documents, things look
differently. Among some very old tablets, somehow undecipherable, they have come across some that can
be characterized as Lists. These are the first works known as "scientific" in Mesopotamia. They are
inventories of signs and words, properly classified on the basis of various criteria. In the beginning they
were in Sumerian only, but later, another column was added to them in Akkadian. At first they were used
as aids for the learning and mastery of the elements of writing. But later developments during the course of
the history of the country show that their purpose was to classify objects, to draw up inventories of the
many sectors of the highly intellectual world, that were both complete and reasoned.
One of the results of this ancient enterprise is a famous "encyclopedia", which was apparently compiled
mainly during the first half of the second millennium, but is treating material that was well before that. It
has close to ten thousand headings, and classifies the quasi-totality of the material universe, both in its
natural state and as modified by the work of humans.
This encyclopedia includes the following:
 All the trees and objects made of wood; the marsh plants and tools made of reed,
 Vases made of clay,
 Different metals and all the things that could be made from them,
 Animals, both domestic and wild,
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





Parts of the body,
Stones and objects made of stone,
Non treelike plants,
Fish and fowl,
Fibers, fabrics, and dresses,
Anything concerning the face of the earth, like cities, places of habitation, mountains and water
courses within and around the country,
 Finally, anything whether natural or manufactured that served as food.
Human order, such as social classes, states, professions, trades etc were the subject of a similar index.
This remarkable literature of classification is the result of an enormous and constant intellectual effort by
the Mesopotamians to understand the universe by classifying and ordering its contents, detailed by its
common and specific features.
There are other literary works that testify, as rigorously, to this extraordinary determination to penetrate
things beyond their appearances. For example there are about fifteen Dialogues that are from the turn of the
third to the second millennium. This was a genre widely used in the country, which took the form of a
literary contest, by confronting two objects, each taken as the prototype representing its species. Each was
personalized and would take turn to reveal its qualities, advantages and prerogatives, until one was declared
the winner. The dialogue would take place, for example, between Summer and Winter; the Bird and the
Fish; the Tree and the Reed; Silver and Copper; the Bull and the Horse; the Hoe and the Plow; the
Millstone and the Mortar4.
By carefully evaluating these labels, we find out that, beyond this mental exercise and endemic
passion for the "duel of prestige", there was, in the bottom, a real logical analysis of objects, always with
the same concern to dissect, compare, classify and understand the things.
There are other works such as the "Treatises" or "Manuals" where this desire to know and understand is
best manifested. These represent the vast majority of a reliable literature, consisting of tens of thousands of
tablets. Each set of tablets is dedicated to one of the intellectual disciplines, with the exception of
lexicography (dictionaries), grammar and philology (the study of literature and relevant fields), which were
the subject of "Lists". Theology _ almost to the level of philosophy or metaphysics_ was partly consigned
to the "Lists" and Catalogs, and partly as mythological stories.
Astronomy was partly included in "Lists", and partly dispersed in a great number of observations, reports
and meticulous calculations. As for the part that has developed later, we can mention jurisprudence,
wrongly called Codes of Law. Mathematics (arithmetic, geometry and algebra) were extremely advanced
since the first half of the second millennium, of which are left amazing samples.
Diagnostic medicine was condensed in a major work made-up of forty tablets. Therapeutic medicine, which
was technical, was treated separately.
Divination, or more accurately, deductive divination, was based on the mythology they had
constructed. Ancient Mesopotamians were persuaded that the world does not exist by itself, and that it must
have been created and governed by supernatural beings. The model for these supernatural beings was
sought in their political power structure, with the king at the top of a pyramid, followed by subordinates,
whose authority emanated from the king. In other words, they transposed their political structure to the
supernatural level, and from there they built their pantheon of gods and explained its mechanism.
Just as the king governed the country by direct orders or through his vicars, so did the gods rule the world
with their plans, by deciding the fate of the people.
The kings used to announce their decisions by issuing written edicts, therefore, the gods, too, must
issue their orders in a written form. Here comes the basis of divination, that is finding and reading the
message of gods. We know that the cuneiform writing was based on pictography, that is using a picture to
convey the idea of an object or an action, such as, for example, drawing a picture of the foot to mean the
foot itself, the walking, or standing. From this analogy was born the idea that the writing of gods must be in
the very things they create in order to make the world run, such as objects, animals, humans and celestial
bodies. If these creations of gods were found to be normal and regular, as was the case most of the time,
then the message, too, was understood to mean life as usual. But, when gods produced something
extraordinary, unusual, not in conformity with its model, then this was understood as god's message for an
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Mortar and pestle used to crush herbs and seeds into powder.
4
unusual destiny. Of course, the message of gods had to be deciphered, interpreted and understood, just as
was done with the pictograms of the original writing.
This was the foundation of deductive divination, that is finding the meaning in the messages of gods,
written in events, or in objects, in order to forecast the destiny of the person involved. This could be the
king, the country, or any individual.
Just as the king might change his mind and forgive a given sentence, so was the case with the
gods, they could be appeased and led to forgive. A number of prescriptions had been devised to incite gods
to modify their verdict into a happier one, or less cruel than the original one.
Therefore, the essential thing in this procedure is a "deduction", a judgement, beginning with a given case
and ending in a definition of the future.
For example, if a horse tried to mate with an ox, a rare and abnormal event, it was considered as a message
from the gods to indicate a reduction in the growth of cattle. This was the omen communicated by the gods,
and their decision, unless precautionary measures were taken to modify their decision.
A careful and thorough analysis of the cuneiform archives reveals important facts. Since the first
half of the second millennium B.C., at the latest, the learned men of antiquity had, with their way and
rational and view of the world, discovered abstract thinking, analysis, deduction, research and the
establishment of principles and laws. In a word, the essentials of the method and spirit of science, even if
they saw and formulated them in their way, which is remote from ours.