Sumitra

Read (http://2ndlook.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/manufacturing-history-euro-style/)

The “Big Powers” of the time — Britain, France and Russia — appointed a Bavarian prince as Greece’s first king – Otto. He arrived in his new kingdom with an entourage of German architects, engineers, doctors and soldiers — and set out to reconfigure the country to the romantic ideal of the times.

The 19th century had seen a resurgence of Europeans’ interest in ancient Greece. Big names such as Goethe, Shelley, Byron, Delacroix and many other artists, poets and musicians sought inspiration in classical beauty. They marveled at the white marble and solemn temples of Hellas, and longed for a lost purity in thought, aesthetics and warm-blooded passion. Revisiting the sensual Greece of Orpheus and Sappho was ballast to the detached coolness of science or the dehumanizing onslaught of the Industrial Revolution.

Otto saw to it that modern Greece lived up to that romantic image. Athens, at that time a small hamlet of a few goatherds, was inaugurated as the new national capital.
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From delanceyplace.com’s review of the book Title: 1616: The World in Motion by Thomas Christensen (2012)-

we now think of Galileo’s proof that the sun was the center of our solar system as the dawn of the scientific age, and he is often called “The Father of Modern Science.” However, all scientific discovery is a continuum-the result of the work of many people. Though it is commonly known Galileo relied on Poland’s Nicolaus Copernicus, we now know that Copernicus’s work owed a debt to the Muslim astronomers Ibn al-Shatr and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, whose works were published by Cardinal Ferdinand de Medici. Galileo owed an even greater debt, one he never acknowledged, to the meticulous work of the German Johann Kepler and his mentor, the Dane Tycho Brahe:

“Despite his personal eccentricities Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) had compiled de­cades of data from his celestial observations that were far more meticulous and precise than anything previously available. His elevation of observa­tion over speculation was one of the key developments leading to the mod­ern concept of inductive scientific investigation. Kepler (1571-1630), though apprecia­tive of the benefit of accurate data, was less capable of obtaining it directly. A bout of smallpox in childhood had left him frail and sickly, with a severe visual handicap: he was short-sighted and had double vision in one eye. Nor did he have the means to construct a large observatory like Tycho’s Uraniborg. So he depended on Tycho for the data he needed to elaborate his theories of celestial harmony. …

“When the published version of Kepler’s The Cosmographic Mystery [the first published defense of the Copernican system] appeared, Kepler was still convinced that his connection of the planetary orbits to the five regular solids was a fundamental breakthrough toward discovering God’s plan for the universe. With great enthusiasm he mailed copies to all of the influential people he could think of who had an interest in astronomical topics or might assist him in his career, but the results of these mailings would be disappoint- ing. Still, among the recipients was a thirty-three-year-old professor of mathematics at the University of Padua [Galileo Galilei], who wrote back to confess that he too was a Copernican, subscribing to the radical notion that the earth orbited around the sun. But he was afraid, he said, to state that belief publicly. Kepler responded by urging him to speak out, but Galileo did not acknowledge this second letter- in fact, he would not be in touch with Kepler again for thirteen years. The reason, according to Albert Einstein, was vanity, which he considered a failing of many great scientists. ‘It has always hurt me to think,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘that Galileo did not acknowledge the work of Kepler.’ …

“Kepler’s working calculations on the orbit of Mars take up nine hundred pages in a minuscule hand. How many more pages would he have needed if he had had to make his calculations using Roman instead of Arabic numerals? It is no lon­ger possible to see the Scientific Revolution as a self-contained European phenomenon; exchange of ideas between Islamic West Asia and Christian Europe was a lively and vital component of the new scientific discoveries.

“Kepler had been an enthusiastic Copernican since his student days, when his embrace of heliocentrism was probably more intuitive than rational. Gal­ileo was a more reluctant Copernican, who tried to avoid addressing the is­sue until led to confront it through his astronomical observations and other research. … Copernicus (1473-1543), who had pub- lished his groundbreaking book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres just before his death in 1543, had been significantly influenced by Islamic astronomical research made centuries before his lifetime.

“In 1957 Otto Neugebauer, a scholar research­ing Copernicus, happened on some diagrams by the fourteenth-century astronomer Ibn al-Shatr, and he recognized that they were identi­cal to some in Copernicus’ work. Later he found that Copernicus had also relied on the work of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, an even earlier astronomer, who had tried to revise traditional Ptolemaic astronomical theory to make it better conform to actual observation. … It was subsequently discovered that Copernicus had even used the same letters as al-Tusi to designate the points in a key dia­gram, removing any lingering doubt that Copernicus had access to the work of Muslim astronomers. (Evidence for Copernicus’s reliance on the work of early Islamic astronomers is summarized by George Saliba in his Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance). …

“A remarkable Arabic publishing operation was funded by Cardinal Fer­dinand de Medici, Duke of Tuscany, in Italy in the late sixteenth century. The Medici Oriental Press-relying on the library of a Turkish scholar who had fled a dispute in his homeland, arrived at Venice around 1577, and con­verted to Christianity-published a number of Arabic-language books. Among those publications was one based on the work of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, one of the astronomers whose work Copernicus drew upon.”

Note the bolded parts. the author of the book use the same argument of C.K.R regarding ‘usefulness’ of greek numerals.Also note connection of Muslim mathematicians & Medici to India.

Also, the manuscript in question miraculously appeared in Bodleian Library in the early 19th century (a time by which the myth of euclid was well established) and Europeans were already weaving tales attributing to the Greeks priority in all areas of knowledge.

http://www.rarebookroom.org/pdfDescriptions/eucmsd.pdf

Now this is how the not-much-loved wikipedia describes references to Euclid from within the elements itself

“There is no mention of Euclid in the earliest remaining copies of the Elements, and most of the copies say they are “from the edition of Theon” or the “lectures of Theon”, while the text considered to be primary, held by the Vatican, mentions no author. The only reference that historians rely on of Euclid having written the Elements was from Proclus, who briefly in his Commentary on the Elements ascribes Euclid as its author.”

In line with my previous comment on exercising caution regarding ‘Greek achievements’ one must also mention Martin Bernal’s ‘Black Athena’ set of works which arguably establishes synthetic nature of the construction of the ‘Greeks’. He demonstrates how a unified Greek identity entirely divorced from its geographical surroundings (eastern-mediterranean and middle east) was constructed during the last two centuries. Thus was born the Hellenism that has been the one of the important cornerstones of western identity for the past two hundred years at least. He goes on to show how the purported Greek miracle was in reality majority contributed by non-greeks (most notably egyptians). It is therefore not inconcievable that late accretive manuscripts
have been lately and wrongly attributed to Greeks when they were contributions of various people and cultures in the first place. Perhaps the only thing conclusively Greek about the manuscript is that it is written in Byzantine Greek (note not ancient greek).

Given this background it is very important (from the perspective of balanced historiography) that we view with skepticism European narratives about the Greeks. This will serve us well in understanding our own history as well.