The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [4]
Both cultures developed mythical explanations for Creation which, they felt, had happened not long before each of them had come into existence. With gods responsible for all aspects of the world and with minimal science and technology developed for practical necessities, their simple cosmology was complete. The environment made no demands on them which they were not able to meet.
Not so the Ionians. The uneven nature of their physical environment, with marginal agricultural productivity, little room for landward expansion, hostile neighbours, and the need to trade, made the colonial Greeks dynamic in outlook. Without theocratic traditions to hold them back they rejected monarchies at an early stage, opting for republican city-states in which a relatively small number of slave-owners governed by mutual consent.
A ninth-century BC clay tablet from Babylonia shows the Sun God and his servants. The magic symbols of divination are present: the sun symbol rests on the stool in front of the god, and in the sky under his canopy are the moon, the sun and Venus. The temple rests on the heavenly ocean, the source of life.
It may have been because of their economic circumstances that the Ionians took a radically new view of the world. Whereas Babylonian astronomy had aided priests to make magic predictions, it now served the Ionians as an aid to maritime navigation. The major advance represented by the use of the Little Bear as an accurate positional aid is attributed to one of the early Ionians, Thales of Miletus, who flourished at the end of the sixth century BC. Little is known of him, none of it contemporary. He almost certainly visited Egypt and may have been instrumental in the introduction of Egyptian geometry to Ionia. He is also reputed to have been able to use Babylonian astronomical techniques to predict eclipses.
Thales and the two generations of students that followed him are credited with the invention of philosophy. These Ionians began, ahead of all others, to ask fundamental questions about how the universe worked. Where the older cultures had been content to refer to custom, edict, revelation and priestly authority, Thales and the others looked to naturalistic explanations for the origin of the world and everything in it. They began to find ways of exploring nature, in order to explain and control it, the better to ensure their survival.
By the time of Thales, the Ionians, due in part to their invention of gold and silver coin, were trading all over the eastern Mediterranean, dealing in a variety of commodities from corn to millstones, silk, copper, gum, salt. They had colonies all along the shores of the Black Sea and were keen explorers, ranging north to the Russian steppes, south to Nubia, and west to the Atlantic, and producing the first maps known to the West to aid them.
The Ionians are credited with the invention of assaying techniques and thence the first use of standard precious metal coins as currency, such as this stater. It shows a man carrying a spear and a bow.
The Ionian interest in practical answers to questions about the world led to the first, crude attempts to find mechanisms, rather than gods, responsible for natural phenomena. Thales thought that the material basic to all existence was water, whose presence was evidently essential