Egypt and Mesopotamia seeded what Greece formalized
History of science tracks natural, social, and formal sciences from antiquity—plus Bronze and Iron Age protosciences like alchemy and astrology. Egypt and Mesopotamia in the third–second millennia BCE supplied math, astronomy, and medicine that shaped Greek natural philosophy.
Sixteenth–seventeenth-century European Scientific Revolution mechanised and mathematised inquiry beyond Greek inheritances. Debates rage over whether English science mislabels premodern and non-scholarly knowledge.
Alfred Edward Taylor described lean stretches of discovery as periodical bankruptcies of science, and historians now see the story as far more tangled than steady progress. As the history of science became a profession in the twentieth century, it splintered into specialities almost as varied as science itself.
Relations with religion have been cast as conflict, harmony, complexity or mutual independence; around 1874 John William Draper, pointing to episodes such as the Galileo affair, pushed a conflict thesis. Historians also stress trust: the Royal Society, founded in 1660, made experiments credible by having members witness them. Before writing, know-how passed down orally and flexibly, with no archives; maize was domesticated in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago. Writing made it possible to store knowledge accurately across generations and was a precondition for philosophy and science.
From about 3000 BCE Egyptians used a decimal number system and geometry aimed at practical problems, such as resurveying fields and plots after floods. Their medical papyri, written between about 2500 and 1200 BCE, blamed disease largely on invading spirits, so treatment mixed remedies with prayer and ritual. Their official calendar was strikingly simple: twelve months of thirty days plus five extra days, ignoring lunar cycles. Further south, study of Nubian mummies in the 1990s found traces of tetracycline in bones dated between 350 and 550 AD, probably from Streptomyces bacteria in grain used for beer, centuries before the antibiotic entered commercial use in the mid twentieth century.
Source: History of science
