West Asian Science

The constellation Orion

From the Stone Age through the Islamic empires, great scientific discoveries have streamed out of West Asia. West Asia is where farming first got started, and where the wheel was first used, and the sailboat. Pottery was first made in West Asia, and the first system of writing was developed in Sumer, including the first way to write down numbers. People in Sumer also first (that we know of) observed the way the planets moved, and were able to predict what the planets would do next. They used this information to invent the signs of the zodiac and cast horoscopes. Today we know that the future can't really be predicted by horoscopes, or by the signs of the zodiac, but what the Sumerians learned about the movement of the planets is still important to astronomers today.
The Sumerians also developed the way we tell time today. In ancient Sumeria they thought there was something special about the number 12 (because that was the number of phases of the moon in one year), and about the number 60 (because it was 5 times 12). So they divided the day up into two sets of twelve hours, 24 hours, and they divided each hour into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds. We still use these divisions today.

The Sumerians also pioneered the use of bronze, a mixture of tin and copper which was the first metal to be used for tools. A thousand years later, also in West Asia, the Hittites were the first to figure out how people could make tools out of iron. Around the same time, in Syria and Phoenicia to the south, the alphabet was first invented.
After the Hittites, the Persians, around 500 BC, were the first to build a long straight road 1000 miles long across their empire, the King's Road. When West Asia was conquered by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, it came under Greek rule, and during this Hellenistic period many West Asian cities had famous schools and were a flourishing source of new scientific ideas. It was in this period that parchment (sheep skins) was first developed as a writing surface, and that many of the first serious research libraries were developed. In Pontus, near the Black Sea, Heraclides showed that the earth turned on its axis, and that Mercury and Venus went around the sun. Eratosthenes, in Cyrene (modern Libya) knew that the earth was round, and calculated that the earth was 25,000 miles in diameter, which is just about right. People disagreed about whether the earth went around the sun or the sun went around the earth. Euclid wrote his Elements, which served as the western world's geometry textbook for more than two thousand years.
Under Parthian and Sassanian rule, the kings encouraged the collection of as much scientific knowledge as possible. In their view, all scientific knowledge came from God through Zoroaster, and so it had belonged to the older Persian empire. When Alexander invaded, he and his Greeks scattered the Persian knowledge all over the world. So Sassanian scholars and librarians tried to collect as much knowledge as possible back into the House of Knowledge in Babylon. They collected books from the Roman Empire, India, and China. Sassanian scientists also worked on astronomy, drawing up more complete tables to predict how the planets and stars would move (or appear to move) in the future. With the coming of Islam West Asia started producing major scientific advances again.

To find out more about West Asian science, check out this book from Amazon.com or from your library:

Science in Ancient Mesopotamia, by Carol Moss (1999). For kids. On the short side.

West Asian Numbers
West Asian Mathematics
Islamic Science
Main West Asia page
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