Revolution of the Hand

Revolution of the Hand

Between 600 and 400 B.C., a great revolution in human thought began. The key to the revolution was the hand. Some of the brilliant Ionian thinkers were the sons of sailors and farmers and weavers. They were accustomed to poking and fixing, unlike the priests and scribes of other nations, who, raised in luxury, were reluctant to dirty their hands.

These scientists rejected superstition, and they worked wonders. In many cases we have only fragmentary or second-hand accounts of what happened. The metaphors used then may be obscure to us now. There was almost certainly a conscious effort a few centuries later to suppress the new insights. The leading figures in this revolution were men with Greek names, largely unfamiliar to us today, but the truest pioneers in the development of our civilisation and our humanity.

We have always attempted to understand the world without invoking the intervention of the gods, but we have always failed. Image: © The Cosmic Shore by Megan Jorgensen

The first Ionian scientist was Thales of Miletus, a city in Asia across a narrow channel of water from the island of Samos. He had traveled in Egypt and was conversant with the knowledge of Babylon. It is said the he predicted a solar eclipse. He learned how to measure the height of a pyramid from the length of its shadow and the angle of the Sun above the horizon, a method employed today to determine the heights of the mountains of the Moon. He was the first to prove geometric theorems of the sort codified by Euclid three centuries later – for example, the proposition that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal. There is a clear continuity of intellectual effort from Thales to Euclid to Isaac Newton’s purchase of the Elements of Geometry at Stourbridge Fair in 1663, the vent that precipitated modern science and technology.

Thales attempted to understand the world without invoking the intervention of the gods. Like the Babylonians, he believed the world to have once been water. To explain the dry land, the Babylonians added that Marduk had placed a mat on the face of the waters and piled dirt upon it (There is some evidence that the antecedent, early Sumerian creation myths were largely naturalistic explanations, later codified around 1000 B.C. in the Enuma elish (When on high), the first words of the poem; but by then the gods had replaced Nature, and the myths offers a theogony, not a cosmogony. The Enuma elish is reminiscent of the Japanese and Ainu myths in which an originally muddy cosmos is beaten by the wings of a bird, separating the land from the water. A Fijian creation myth says: “Rokomautu created the land. He scooped it up out of the bottom of the ocean inn great handfuls and accumulated it in piles here and there. These are the Fiji Islands”. The distillation of land from water is a natural enough idea for island and seafaring peoples.