The Greek word for philosopher may have been borrowed from Egypt
Philosophy is usually hailed as a Greek invention, and modern scholars largely agree. Yet the Greeks themselves credited Egypt, and recent work by Egyptologists suggests even the word philosophos, lover of wisdom, may translate an older Egyptian expression, mer-rekh, carrying exactly the same meaning.
Greek philosophy took shape in the 6th century BCE and ranged far beyond what the word covers today. Its thinkers tackled astronomy, mathematics, biology and rhetoric alongside ethics, logic, metaphysics, politics and theories of knowledge and beauty. The tradition carried on through the Hellenistic age and eventually flowed into Roman philosophy.
Its reach has been enormous. Lines of influence run without a break from the Greek and Hellenistic schools through Roman thought, early Islamic philosophy, medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Alfred North Whitehead famously suggested that the whole European tradition could be summed up as footnotes to Plato. Even the way the field is divided reflects one man: because Plato's portrait of Socrates proved so dominant, everything before him is lumped together as pre-Socratic, with Classical and then Hellenistic philosophy following around the conquests of Alexander the Great.
Where did it come from? The Greeks readily acknowledged Egyptian predecessors. In the fifth century BC the orator Isocrates claimed the earliest Greek thinkers travelled to Egypt in search of learning, naming Pythagoras of Samos as the man who first brought philosophy home. Near Eastern wisdom writings and creation myths probably played some part too, though how much is hotly debated. The classicist Martin Litchfield West argued that contact with Eastern cosmology freed the Greek imagination and handed them plenty of suggestive ideas, but that they taught themselves to reason, making philosophy as we know it a Greek creation.
Modern scholarship generally sides with that view, treating Greek philosophy as a distinctive tradition its thinkers developed independently, even while the vocabulary may carry Egyptian fingerprints.
Source: Ancient Greek philosophy
