Early in his reign, King Nebuchadnezzar assembled a multi-national council of advisers who were “skillful in all wisdom, cunning in knowledge, and understanding science …” (Daniel 1:4). The Israelite prophet Daniel was among their number. He had been deported to Babylon and, as one of the intellectual elites of Israel, inducted into Nebuchadnezzar’s advisory council. The Bible describes these advisers as magicians, astrologers, sorcerers and “the wise men”. They were knowledgeable in calendars and mathematics and what we would today call astronomy and astrology. Daniel was a stand-out in this illustrious group because of his God-given ability to interpret visions and dreams (Daniel 1:17).
The fact that Nebuchadnezzar assembled this cosmopolitan think-tank was emblematic of the Babylonians’ focus on knowledge and learning. Charting the sun, seasons and the year was critical to this ancient agricultural society to inform its crop cycles.[1] The Babylonians sought to understand the movement of the planets so that they could make astronomical predictions[2] and developed water clocks which enabled astronomical data to be recorded with higher accuracy.[3] They understood that the solar year was the time taken for the sun to return to the same position in its path relative to other heavenly bodies in the region of the sky they called the zodiac. Armed with this knowledge, and with their reasonably accurate water clocks, they estimated the length of the solar year as 360 days, which fitted neatly with their numbering system.[4] Despite their sophistication, the Babylonian calendars nonetheless underestimated the length of the solar year and became progressively out of step with the movement of the sun. But their achievements were impressive—the Babylonians had invented scientific astronomy. This was an ancient instance of descriptive model science. Subsequent work by ancient Egyptian astronomers showed that the solar year was longer; they added an extra five days to the Babylonian calendar, making 365 days.
The Babylonians made significant advances in mathematics. They could calculate simple areas and volumes, and it is likely they could calculate the surface area of a sphere.[5] Babylonians understood what we now know as Pythagoras’ theorem[6] in its full generality, and could calculate the square root of two to a precision of one part in a hundred thousand.[7] Their advanced numbering system also helped them make progress in algebra and number theory, as well as geometry.[8] The Babylonians calculated various values for pi, from an imprecise “3” to more precise estimates.[9]
Like other ancient societies, the Babylonians considered the earth to be a flat disk.[10] This model correlated with simple observations.
With the collapse of the Babylonian empire in the sixth century BC, the intellectual accomplishments of the empire were transferred to the Medo-Persian empire, and later to the Greek empire, under Alexander the Great, in the fourth century BC. The Babylonians, with their merit-based think-tanks, had invented a system of knowledge that could be exported across cultures. Even if progress occurred in fits and starts, their scholarship had kick-started cumulative advances.
The vision of Nebuchadnezzar positioned the ancient Greek civilization as two sections below that of the Babylonians. Instead of gold, this empire was represented by brass. Ancient Greece was a polytheistic, warlike, slave-based society which sometimes resorted to human sacrifice. [11] Nonetheless, it made substantial developments in science, mathematics and philosophy. The influence of the Greeks has continued through to the present. Our broad-brush view of scientific history must therefore trace the Greek influence in several domains of knowledge.
[1] Kuhn, 1957, p. 10.
[2] “… all the Babylonian astronomical models, as I still feel justified in calling them, were entirely arithmetical in character” (Aaboe, 1974, pp. 34–35).
[3] Kuhn, 1957, p. 9.
[4] Ibid., p. 11.
[5] Aleksandrov, Kolmogorov, & Lavrent’ev, 1999, p. 21 (Vol 1).
[6] Struik, 1967, p. 27.
[7] Aaboe, 1964, p. 26.
[8] Ibid., p. 29.
[9] Ibid, p. 30.
[10] Blacker & Loewe, 1975, p. 61.
[11] Acton, 1864, pp. 8, 13, 17–19.