Hellenophilia versus the History of Science

Author(s): David Pingree

Source: Isis , Dec., 1992, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 554-563
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science
Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/234257

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 Hellenophilia versus the History
of Science

By David Pingreet

THE GENESIS OF THIS PAPER lies in a conversation that I had with A. I.

Sabra of Harvard on the perennial problem of the definition of science
appropriate to a historian of science; its corruption (including the deliberately
extreme mode of its expression) is entirely a result of my own labors. For the
piece represents the attitudes toward the subject that I have developed over some
three and a half decades of studying the history of the "exact" sciences (as I will
persist in calling them despite the lack of exactitude in some of them), as prac-
ticed in ancient Mesopotamia, in ancient and medieval Greece, India, and the
Latin-speaking West, and in medieval Islam. It is this experience, then, and the
desire to reconstruct a complex history as accurately as possible, that motivates
me-these two, and the wish to provide an apologia for my claim to be a historian
of science rather than of quackery. For the sciences I study are those related to
the stars, and they include not only various astronomies and the different math-
ematical theories they employ, but also astral omens, astrology, magic, medicine,
and law (dharmasaistra). All of these subjects, I would argue, were or are sci-
ences within the contexts of the cultures in which they once flourished or now are
practiced. As such they deserve to be studied by historians of science with as
serious and thorough a purpose as are the topics that we usually find discussed in
history of science classrooms or in the pages of Isis. This means that their intel-
lectual content must be probed deeply, and not simply dismissed as rubbish or
interpreted in the light of modern historical mythology; and that the intellectual
content must be related to the culture that produced and nourished each, and to
the social context within which each arose and developed.
In stating these opinions I may appear to have set myself up as a relativist, but
I would deny the applicability of that epithet to my position since my interest lies
not in judging the truth or falsehood of these or any other sciences, nor in dis-
covering in them some part that might be useful or relevant to the present world,
but simply in understanding how, why, where, and when they worked as func-
tioning systems of thought and interacted with each other and with other systems
of thought.
It is with these considerations in mind, then, that I have embraced the word
employed in the title of this article, "Hellenophilia," as it is a most convenient
description of a set of attitudes that I perceive to be of increasing prevalence

t Box 1900, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912.

This paper was originally delivered as a lecture at the Department of History of Science, Harvard
University, 14 November 1990.

ISIS, 1992, 83: 554-563 554

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 CULTURES OF ANCIENT SCIENCE 555

within the profession of the history of science, and which I believe to be thor-
oughly pernicious. I like "Hellenophilia" as a word because it brings to mind
such other terms as "necrophilia," a barbaric excess that erupts as a disease from
the passionate rather than from the rational soul; whereas the true love of the
Greeks, Philhellenism, though also an attribute of barbarians such as are we-the
epithet "Philhellene" was proudly borne by ancient Parthians, Semites, and Ro-
mans-arises preeminently from well-deserved admiration. A Philhellene is one
who shares in what used to be, when children in the West still were taught the
classics, a virtually universal awe of Greek literature, art, philosophy, and sci-
ence; a Hellenophile suffers from a form of madness that blinds him or her to
historical truth and creates in the imagination the idea that one of several false
propositions is true. The first of these is that the Greeks invented science; the
second is that they discovered a way to truth, the scientific method, that we are
now successfully following; the third is that the only real sciences are those that
began in Greece; and the fourth (and last?) is that the true definition of science is
just that which scientists happen to be doing now, following a method or methods
adumbrated by the Greeks, but never fully understood or utilized by them.
Hellenophiles, it might be observed, are overwhelmingly Westerners, display-
ing the cultural myopia common in all cultures of the world but, as well, the
arrogance that characterized the medieval Christian's recognition of his own in-
fallibility and that has now been inherited by our modern priests of science.
Intellectually these Western Hellenophiles are still living in the miasma that per-
meated Europe until the nineteenth century, before the discovery of Sanskrit and
the cracking of cuneiform destroyed such ethnocentric rubbish; such persons
have simply not been exposed to the knowledge they would need to arrive at a
more balanced judgment. But, sadly, I must report that many non-Westerners
have caught a form of the disease Hellenophilia; they are deluded into believing
that the greatest glory an Indian, a Chinese, an Arab, or an African scientist can
have acquired is that gained by having anticipated either a Greek or a modern
Westerner. So some Indians, for instance, busily reinterpret their divinely in-
spired Rgveda so that it teaches such modern hypothetical theories as that of
relativity or the latest attempt to explain black holes, as if these transitory ideas
were eternal complete truths. In doing this they are behaving as did those Chris-
tians who once believed it important to demonstrate that Genesis agrees with
Greek science. These attempts do not enhance the brilliance of the authors or the
reinterpreters of their sacred or scientific texts, but rather reveal a severe sense
of cultural inferiority.
Parallel to this form of cultural denigration, practiced by the culture itself or by
historians of science, is, say, the false claim that medieval Islam only preserved
Greek science and transmitted it as Muslims had received it to the eager West. In
fact Arab scientists, using Indian, Iranian, and Syrian sources as well as their
own genius, revised the Greek sciences, transforming them into the Islamic sci-
ences that, historically, served as the main basis for what little science there was
in Western Europe in the twelfth and following centuries and for the amazing
developments that happened three and four centuries later in Italy and Central
Europe.
Another form that this Western arrogance takes is the naive assumption that
other peoples in the world not only should be like us, but actually are or were-

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556 PINGREE: HELLENOPHILIA V. HISTORY OF SCIENCE

"were" because this particular fallacy usually affects those who study Stone Age
and other preliterate cultures that have been left defenseless in the face of mod-
ern reconstructions of their thoughts by their inability to record them in perma-
nent form. In the history of the exact sciences the scholars who perpetrate wild
theories of prehistoric science call themselves archaeoastronomers. The basic
premise of some archaeoastronomers is that megalithic and other cultures in
which writing was not known built stone monuments, some quite massive, in
order to record their insights into the periodicity of celestial motions. This seems
to me a trivial purpose to motivate such monumental communal efforts as the
building of Stonehenge or the pyramids. There are many strong arguments to be
raised against many of these interpretations. At this point, however, I wish only
to point out that they go against the strong evidence from early literate societies
that early man had little interest in the stars before the end of the third millen-
nium B.C.; the cataloguing of stars and the recording of stellar and planetary
phenomena are not a natural, but a learned activity that needs a motivation such
as that which inspired the Babylonians, who believed that the gods send mes-
sages to mankind through the celestial bodies. The realization that some of these
ominous phenomena are periodic can be dated securely in Mesopotamia to a time
no earlier than the late second millennium B.C.; mathematical control of the re-
lation between solar and lunar motion came only in about 500 B.C. The Egyptians
also first began using selected stars as a sort of crude clock only in about 2000
B.C. and progressed no further in mathematical astronomy till they came under
Babylonian influence. The earliest traces of a knowledge of astronomy in Greece
and India seem also to be derived, in the early first millennium B.C., from Mes-
opotamia. I cannot speak of the astronomy of the early Chinese with authority
because I am ignorant of their language, but I gather from what I have read that
not even the beginnings of the system of the hsiu or lunar lodges can be dated
before the late second millennium B.C. From the written evidence, then, it ap-
pears that an interest in the stars as omens arose in Mesopotamia after 2000 B.C.
and started to develop toward mathematical astronomy in about 1200 B.C., but
that the Babylonians began to invent mathematical models useful for the predic-
tion of celestial phenomena with some degree of accuracy only in about 500 B.C.
From Mesopotamia these astronomical ideas rapidly radiated to Egypt, later to
Greece and India, and finally, perhaps, to China; in each of these cultures they
were molded by the recipient scientists into something new, though still having
recognizable Mesopotamian origins. The astral sciences spread from one civili-
zation to another like a highly infectious disease. It is within the context of this
documented history that I find implausible the suggestion that less advanced
civilizations, without any known systems of writing or accurate record keeping,
independently discovered complex lunar theories, or precession, or even an ac-
curate intercalation cycle. The example of the Babylonians, with their need for a
specific motive for observing stars and the fact that it took them a millennium and
a half to arrive at a workable mathematical astronomy, and the examples of the
Egyptians, Greeks, and Indians, if not the Chinese, who initially borrowed their
astronomies from the Babylonians before each developed its science in its own
way, seem to me to invalidate the theoretical basis for much of archaeoastron-
omy.
I return now to the four variants of Hellenophilia that I mentioned earlier.

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 CULTURES OF ANCIENT SCIENCE 557

Each, I would claim, distorts the history of science in two ways: passively, it
limits the phenomena that the historian is willing or able to examine; actively, it
perverts understanding both of Western sciences, from the Greeks till now, and
of non-Western sciences. Thus those who still believe that the Greeks invented
science either are altogether ignorant of, say, Babylonian mathematics and as-
tronomy or else, though aware of them, fall into my second category and refuse
to recognize them as sciences. The ignorance of the first group, of course, can
and should be remedied through education; the obstinacy of the second in not
acknowledging that Old Babylonian investigations of irrational numbers like
of arithmetical and geometrical series, or of Pythagorean triplets are science even
though they are mathematically correct, or in asserting that the arithmetical
schemes that they successfully used to control the many variables involved in the
prediction of the time of the first visibility of the lunar crescent cannot bear the
august name of scientia even though the predictions were essentially correct-
this obstinacy is hard to deal with. It leaves the obstinate, however, in the awk-
ward position of denying the status of science to one of the main contributors to
the Greek astronomy that is the forebear of our positional astronomy. Such a
person, of course, can name an arbitrary date at which positional astronomy
comes to fit into his or her definition of science; but this cannot be accepted by a
historian, as it is the historian's task to seek out the origins of the ideas that he or
she is dealing with, and these manifestly lie, for astronomy, in the wedges im-
pressed on clay tablets as well as in the observed motions of the celestial bodies.
It is certainly possible to be a modern scientist without knowing history, or even
with a firm belief in historical mythology; but can a historian of science function
effectively under such disabilities?
While ignorance of Babylonian astronomy destroys the historian's ability to
understand the origins and development of Greek and other astronomies together
with their more modern descendants, it also tempts him or her to imagine that
there is no other way to do astronomy than through the Greek and modern way of
making observations and building geometric models. But Babylonian astronomy
reveals how few observations are needed and how imprecise they may be if the
astronomers are clever enough; and it also demonstrates that simple arithmetical
models suffice for predicting the times and longitudes of periodic celestial phe-
nomena. The Babylonian solutions are brilliant applications of mathematical
structures to rather crude data, made purely to provide the possibility of predic-
tion without any concern for theories of cosmological structure or celestial me-
chanics. The Greeks added the concern both for the geometrical structure of the
universe and for the cinematics of the heavens, with a strong prejudice in favor of
circles or spheres rotating with uniform motion; but they also, to a large extent,
simply expressed the Babylonian period relations and arithmetical zigzag and
step functions in a geometrical language, using observations to modify Babylo-
nian parameters and to fine-tune their own geometrical models. A third variety of
astronomy emerged from the synthesis of Babylonian arithmetical models, Hel-
lenistic geometrical models, and local mathematical traditions that occurred in
India in the fifth century A.D. In this astronomy questions of celestial cinematics
receded into trivial mechanisms while computational finesse harnessed a broad
range of mathematical techniques to the solution of astronomical problems, with
the role of observations being limited to the confirmation, if possible, of accepted

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558 PINGREE: HELLENOPHILIA V. HISTORY OF SCIENCE

theory. There were historically many more astronomies, manifesting a variety of

ways in which the same phenomena might be made predictable by mathematical
means. These different astronomies reflect the different intellectual traditions of
the various cultures as well as the specific problems that each society wished its
astronomers to address-for example, the Babylonians were interested in certain
horizon phenomena that they regarded as omens; the Greeks brought philosoph-
ical and physical problems into a science that had been purely mathematical, and
as well introduced the more social aim of casting horoscopes; and the Indians
devoted their efforts to the purely pragmatic goals of casting horoscopes, of pre-
dicting eclipses because of their significance as omens, and of evolving and reg-
ulating an extraordinarily complex calendar. I believe that those historians who
limit themselves to the study of only one of these approaches to mathematical
astronomy will blunder, as indeed many have, by not fully understanding the
range of possibilities or the shaping force of purely cultural factors on the course
that any science takes.
If it is evident that for a historian the proposition that the Greeks invented
science must be rejected, it necessarily follows that they did not discover a
unique scientific method. Indeed, they-and we-have not one, but many scien-
tific methods; biologists, physicists, and astronomers went, and go, their separate
methodological ways. I choose, therefore, to focus on the pride of Greek science:
Euclidean geometry-which, of course, is purely logical and nonexperimental.
This is often and justly praised for the rigor and power of its axiomatic system
and for its ability to offer logical deductive proofs. Indeed, Babylonian and Indian
mathematics are frequently criticized for relying not on proofs but on demonstra-
tions. But without axioms and without proofs Indian mathematicians solved in-
determinate equations of the second degree and discovered the infinite power
series for trigonometrical functions centuries before European mathematicians
independently reached similar results. These achievements amply demonstrate, I
believe, that the Euclidean approach is not necessary for discovery in mathemat-
ics. Those who deny the validity of alternative scientific methods must somehow
explain how equivalent scientific "truths" can be arrived at without Greek meth-
ods. And in their denial they clearly deprive themselves of an opportunity to
understand science more deeply.
To depart briefly from the exact sciences, I would like to draw attention to the
fascinating work of Francis Zimmermann on ayurveda, the Indian science of
longevity, as it was and is currently practiced in Kerala. While he strongly sup-
ports the idea of the historical dependence of ayurveda on the Galenic theory of
humors, Zimmermann is also keenly aware of the many ways in which Indian
vaidyas have altered foreign notions while incorporating them into their own
cultural traditions to create a theory of harmony and mutual influence between
the humans, animals, and plants inhabiting any region and that region's terrain
and climate. In Kerala these "ecological" ideas produced a local interpretation of
ayurvedic doctrine that, it would appear, maintained a generally healthy human
population, at least to that population's satisfaction, as long as the people were
not subjected to wars, famines, or epidemics. The a-yurvedic approach to medi-
cine does not inspire its practitioners to make discoveries in molecular biology,
but it is the correct medical science for the cultural context within which it op-
erates. And it attempts to address psychological, social, and environmental as-

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 CULTURES OF ANCIENT SCIENCE 559

pects of health that our mechanistic medicine tends to ignore. Western doctors
have something to learn about medical care from a-yurveda, and so do Western
historians of medicine.
The third fallacious opinion that I have associated with the Hellenophiles is
that the only sciences are those that accredited Greeks recognized as such. This
opinion generally takes the form of allowing Aristotle to define science for us, so
that it excludes even the genuinely Greek sciences of astrology, divination,
magic, and other so-called superstitions. This brings us squarely to the funda-
mental question of this paper: What is the proper definition of science for a
historian of science? I would offer this as the simplest, broadest, and most useful:
science is a systematic explanation of perceived or imaginary phenomena, or else
is based on such an explanation. Mathematics finds a place in science only as one
of the symbolical languages in which scientific explanations may be expressed.
This definition deliberately fails to distinguish between true and false science, for
explanations of phenomena are never complete and can never be proved to be
"true." Obviously, this shortfall is as true of modern scientific hypotheses as of
ancient ones. It is, therefore, inappropriate to apply a standard of truthfulness to
the sciences, at least viewed as historical phenomena, for the best that modern
scientists can claim-I cannot judge whether justly or not-is that they are closer
to some truth than were their predecessors; nor, for the reasons I have already
stated, can the methodologies of science be limited to just those employed by
present-day scientists.
If my definition of science as it must be viewed by a historian is accepted, it is
easy to show that astrology and certain "learned" forms of divination, magic,
alchemy, and so on are "sciences." Some may regard this procedure for elevating
superstition to the rank of scientific theory as arbitrary and unfair, but remember
that modern science is the initial culprit in that it arbitrarily sets up its own
criteria by which it judges itself and all others. If I am a relativist, then, it is
precisely at this point where, as a historian, I refuse to allow modern scientists
who know little of history to define for me the bounds of what in the past-or in
the present-I am allowed to consider to be science. It pains me to hear some
scientists, who have not seriously considered the subject, denounce astrology as
"unscientific" when all that they mean is that it does not agree with their ideas
about the way the universe functions and does not adhere to their concept of a
correct methodology. It pains me not because I believe that astrology is true; on
the contrary, I believe it to be totally false. But the anathemas hurled at it by
some scientists remind me more of the anathemas leveled by the medieval
Church against those who disagreed with its dogmas than of rational argument. In
its persecution of heretics as in its missionary zeal and its tendency to sermonize
and to pontificate, our scientific establishment displays marked similarities to the
Church, whose place in our society it has largely usurped.
That Church, like modern science, condemned divination, astrology, and
magic, though on the grounds that they limit God's power and human free will
rather than that they fail to conform to our current "laws of nature." Both of
these arguments, to my way of thinking, are arbitrary and irrelevant to a histo-
rian, who should remain free of either the Church's or modern science's theol-
ogy.

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560 PINGREE: HELLENOPHILIA V. HISTORY OF SCIENCE

To turn to history: Babylonian divination is a systematic explanation of phe-

nomena based on the theory that certain of them are signs sent by the gods to
warn those expert in their interpretation of future events; there is no causal
connection, but only one of prediction so that appropriate countermeasures may
be undertaken. In this system the stars and the planets, which are regarded as the
manifestations of the individual gods in the sky, indicate by their changes in
quality and in location the events that will befall mankind at large, or a country in
general, or a specific king and his family. Omens that appear on earth are con-
trived by gamas, the god of the sun, to warn individual men of the coming of
good or evil. In themselves, texts describing the rules of the interpretation of
omens-Enuima Anu Enlil for celestial omens and summa alu for terrestrial
ones-are scientific; they provide systematic explanations of phenomena. The
former is in addition closely allied to the origins of mathematical astronomy, for
the tablets of Enuima Anu Enlil contain the first recorded realization of the peri-
odicity of certain celestial phenomena and the first attempts to provide mathe-
matical models for predicting the occurrences of such phenomena. This close
linkage between divination and mathematical astronomy, as well as a linkage
between divination and the observations necessary for constructing and refining
mathematical astronomy, persisted in the first millennium B.C. in the cuneiform
Letters, Reports, and Diaries. Moreover, as the mathematical models became
more sophisticated and the descriptions of the observed phenomena became
more precise, the rules for predicting terrestrial events from the celestial phe-
nomena became more complex. Babylonia, then, provides us our first example of
the fruitful interplay between the theoretical and the applied aspects of a science.
Astrology grew out of a union of aspects of advanced Babylonian celestial
divination with Aristotelian physics and Hellenistic astronomy; this union-il-
licit, some may think-occurred in Egypt in the second century B.C. The product
was the supreme attempt made in antiquity to create in a rigorous form a causal
model of the kosmos, one in which the eternally repeating rotations of the celes-
tial bodies, together with their varying but periodically recurring interrelation-
ships, produce all changes in the sublunar world of the four elements that,
whether primary, secondary, or tertiary effects, constitute the generation and
decay of material bodies and the modifications of the parts or functions of the
rational and irrational souls of men, animals, and plants. In other words, ancient
Greek astrology in its strictest interpretation was the most comprehensive scien-
tific theory of antiquity, providing through the application of the mathematical
models appropriate to it predictions of all changes that take place in a world of
cause and effect; it is not surprising, then, that it was called simply mathesis or
"science" by Firmicus Maternus and others.
But even within Greek astrology there was a movement toward a relaxation of
the rigidity of the theory, both because of the frequent failure of the predictions
and, more important, because of people's desire to circumvent unpleasant pre-
dictions-a practical rather than a theological demand for a modicum of free
choice and self-determination. This trend toward an astrology that indicates pre-
dispositions instead of concrete inevitabilities was accentuated when the Greek
form of this science was transmitted to India and transformed into a system that
rapidly increased the complexity of the mathematical models in order to diffuse

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 CULTURES OF ANCIENT SCIENCE 561

and mollify the inescapability of a simpler predictive scheme. The Indians at-
tempted to match the bewildering variousness of real lives by an equally bewil-
dering multiplicity of mathematically computable variants in astrology.
If Greek astrology is based on the idea that the motions and interrelations of
the celestial spheres are ultimately the causes of all terrestrial phenomena, astral
magic, which was concocted out of Babylonian and Indian liturgies and iconog-
raphies mingled with Greek astrology, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Hellenistic phi-
losophy by the self-styled Sabaeans of Harran in the ninth century, assumes that
the magus's soul is free of inhibiting stellar influences, so that, by manipulating
terrestrial objects, he can reverse the processes of astrology and change the wills
of the planetary spirits. In this way the magus can employ the astral influences
defined by astrology to effect the changes he wishes in the sublunar world. This
was a dream still dreamt by two founding members of the Royal Society, Kenelm
Digby and Elias Ashmole.
These same Sabaeans invented also a second type of learned magic based on
Plato's and Aristotle's theories of animal and human souls. In this magic, which
I have dubbed psychic, the magus artificially creates new animals by uniting
either within a womb or within a womblike chamber animal or human parts
representing the material body and the particular part or function of the soul that
he wishes his creation to be endowed with. The magus can then employ his
artificial animal to accomplish wonders. Astral and psychic magic we may not
wish to test in order to determine their validity, but as historians we must regard
them as scientific, if for no other reason than because many Western scientists in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took them to be genuine sciences. And,
of course, they do fall under the aegis of my definition of science.
The same status must be accorded, then, to alchemy-be it Greek, Arabic,
Chinese, or Indian-and to other systematic theories that explain phenomena,
whether the lapidaries and physiognomics that spread from Mesopotamia to
Greece, to Iran, and to India, or the science of determining sites suitable for
different types of buildings-a science found in different forms in China and in
India-or the purely Indian analysis of the processes of converting thought into
sound in order to produce intelligible speech. These and other sciences cannot be
dismissed simply because they do not fall into the intellectual system favored by
some Greek philosophers.
I have already, if I have been at all successful, persuaded you that the fourth
variety of Hellenophilia, in which one defines science as that which modern
Western scientists believe in and the methodologies with which they operate, is
inappropriate to a historian, though it may be useful to a modern Western scien-
tist. And I have already mentioned that among the advantages provided to the
historian by looking outside of the confines of such a restricted definition are a
realization of the potential diversity of interpretations of phenomena and of the
actual diversity of the origins of the ideas that have developed into modern West-
ern science among other sciences, and an objectivity born of an understanding of
the cultural factors that impel sciences and scientists to follow one path rather
than another. The loss of all these advantages is the price paid for suffering the
passive effects of this form of Hellenophilia.
Its active form is more pervasive in and pernicious to history. This results in
the attitude that it is the task of the historian not to study the whole of a science

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562 PINGREE: HELLENOPHILIA V. HISTORY OF SCIENCE

within its cultural context, but to attempt to discover within the science elements
similar to elements of modern Western science. One example I can give you
relates to the Indian Madhava's demonstration, in about 1400 A.D., of the infinite
power series of trigonometrical functions using geometrical and algebraic argu-
ments. When this was first described in English by Charles Whish, in the 1830s,
it was heralded as the Indians' discovery of the calculus. This claim and Madha-
va's achievements were ignored by Western historians, presumably at first be-
cause they could not admit that an Indian discovered the calculus, but later
because no one read anymore the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, in
which Whish's article was published. The matter resurfaced in the 1950s, and
now we have the Sanskrit texts properly edited, and we understand the clever
way that Madhava derived the series without the calculus; but many historians
still find it impossible to conceive of the problem and its solution in terms of
anything other than the calculus and proclaim that the calculus is what Madhava
found. In this case the elegance and brilliance of Madhava's mathematics are
being distorted as they are buried under the current mathematical solution to a
problem to which he discovered an alternate and powerful solution.
Other examples of this dangerous tendency abound. For instance, since the
1850s historians ignorant of Madhava's work have argued about whether Indian
astronomers had the concept of the infinitesimal calculus on the basis of their use
of the equivalent of the cosine function in a formula for finding the instantaneous
velocity of the moon, a formula that occurs already in a sixth-century Sanskrit
text, the PancasiddhCantiki. I cannot tell you how that formula was derived, since
its author, Varahamihira, has not told me; but I find it totally implausible that
some Indian discovered the calculus-a discovery for which previous develop-
ments in Indian mathematics would not at all have prepared him-applied his
discovery only to the problem of the instantaneous velocity of the moon, and
then threw it away. The idea that he might have discovered the calculus arises
only from the Hellenophilic attitude that what is valuable in the past is what we
have in the present; this attitude makes historians become treasure hunters seek-
ing pearls in the dung heap without any concern for where the oysters live and
how they manufacture gems.
One particularly dangerous form of this aspect of Hellenophilia is the positivist
position that is confident that mathematical logic provides the correct answers to
questions in the history of the exact sciences. I, of course, am not denying the
power of mathematics to provide insights into the character and structure of
scientific theories; obviously, Otto Neugebauer's brilliant analysis of the astro-
nomical tables written in cuneiform during the Seleucid period gives us a pro-
found understanding of how this astronomy worked mathematically, and it tells
us something about some stages in the development of the science as recorded on
the hundreds of tablets that he investigated. But it does not and cannot, as Neu-
gebauer well knew, answer a whole range of historical questions. We do not
know by whom, when, or where any Babylonian lunar or planetary theory was
invented; we do not know what observations were used, or where and why they
were recorded; we do not know much about the stages by which Babylonian
astronomers went from the crude planetary periods, derived from omen texts,
found in MUL.APIN to the full-scale ephemerides of the last few centuries B.C.
Historians need to be very careful in assessing the nature of the questions the

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 CULTURES OF ANCIENT SCIENCE 563

material at hand will allow them to answer with a reasonable expectation of

probability; and they must hope for and search out new evidence. But the posi-
tivists jump in to claim that mathematical models (and they usually use quite
simple ones) suffice to describe the idiosyncratic behavior of people and to ac-
count for the perverse quirks in their personalities. I will not here name names,
but the number of historians of the exact sciences who suffer from this malady is
appallingly large; they can be easily recognized by the characteristic trait that, in
general, the remoter the time and the scantier the evidence, the more precise
their computations. Millennia of history are made to depend on the measurement
of an arc of a few minutes or degrees when it has not even been convincingly
demonstrated that any arc was being measured at all.
So far I have been attempting to discredit Hellenophilia on the grounds that it
renders those affected by it unable to imagine many significant questions that
legitimately should be addressed by historians of science and that it perverts their
judgment. Much of my argument has been based on the anthropological percep-
tion that science is not the apprehension of an external set of truths that mankind
is progressively acquiring a greater knowledge of, but that rather the sciences are
the products of human culture. But this viewpoint must be modified by a further
consideration, to which I have from time to time alluded since it strengthens the
arguments in favor of the definition of science that I proposed. This consideration
is that, as a simple historical fact, scientific ideas have been transmitted for mil-
lennia from culture to culture, and transformed by each recipient culture into
something new. This is particularly noticeable in the astral sciences that I study-
astronomy, astral omens, astrology, and astral magic-but can be readily dis-
cerned in many others. The taproot and trunk of the tree of the astral sciences are
buried in the Mesopotamian desert, with subsidiary roots in Egypt and China (I
have lopped the Mayas off this arboreal image, as they are self-rooted). From
Babylonia the tree branched out to Egypt, to Greece, to Syria, to Iran, to India,
and to China; grafted onto different cultural stocks in each of these civilizations,
it developed variant leaves, shoots, and flowers. The process of the intertwining
of these diverse varieties of astronomies throughout Eurasia and North Africa
was amazingly complex, as ideas, mathematical models, parameters, and instru-
ments circulated rapidly over the vast expanse of divergent traditions. Out of this
process modern Western astronomy sprang from a rather late branch that grew
from and was fed by an incredibly complicated undergrowth. For very complex
reasons this modern Western astronomy has choked off all of its rivals and de-
stroyed the intellectual diversity that mankind enjoyed before it moved from
simple communication to Western domination. We cannot know what the Is-
lamic, Indian, or Chinese astral sciences might have become had this not hap-
pened, except that they would not have become what our culture has produced.
But unraveling the intertwined webbing of these sciences is a fascinating and a
rewarding task for a historian, and one in which much remains to be done. I
strongly recommend to those of you who have the opportunity thus to broaden
your perspectives to grasp it.

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