古埃及与美索不达米亚的科学起源：从占星学到医学系统

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"The Beginnings of Western Science" 是一本探讨西方科学起源的书籍，作者戴维·林德伯格深入研究了古代社会的知识体系及其对现代科学的影响。本书的扩展版首先讨论了科学的定义问题，然后介绍了史前社会的知识形式以及这些文化中的真理观念。在埃及和巴比伦科学部分，书中比较了它们不同的算术类型，并指出巴比伦的记数系统因其简洁性而更为优越。此外，还强调了巴比伦占星学的重要发展，特别是个人星盘占星术的出现。书中也描述了埃及和巴比伦的医学实践，这些医学体系是基于诊断的系统化，其中往往包含非自然主义的元素。章节概览： 1. 第一章 - 希腊之前的科学：什么是科学？本章探讨了史前时期对自然的态度，以及埃及和美索不达米亚早期科学的萌芽。 2. 第二章 - 希腊人与宇宙：从荷马和赫西俄德的世界观开始，讲述最早的希腊哲学家，包括米利都学派对基础现实的探索，变化的问题以及知识的问题。还讨论了柏拉图的形式世界和他的宇宙论。 3. 第三章 - 亚里士多德的自然哲学：概述亚里士多德的生活和工作，他的形而上学和认识论，自然与变化的关系，宇宙论，地球和天体的运动，以及他在生物学领域的贡献。 4. 第四章 - 希腊化时期的自然哲学：讨论了学园的发展，亚里士多德之后的哲学流派，如伊壁鸠鲁学派和斯多葛学派。 5. 第五章 - 古代的数学科学：阐述了数学在自然界的运用，古希腊数学的发展，早期希腊天文学，宇宙学的进步，希腊行星天文学，以及光学和重量科学。 6. 第六章 - 希腊和罗马医学：介绍了早期希腊医学，希波克拉底医学，希腊化时代的解剖学，以及罗马医学的演变。本书不仅详尽地追溯了西方科学的起源，还揭示了不同文明之间的知识交流和科学思想的发展，为理解现代科学的根基提供了宝贵的视角。通过深入研究这些古代文明的科学成就，读者可以更好地认识到科学方法和知识体系是如何逐步形成的。

the god Osiris and his consort Isis, the god Seth and his consort Nephthys. These represent the

creatures of this world, whether human, divine, or cosmic.

A Babylonian myth attributes the origin of the world to the sexual activity of Enki, god of the waters.

Enki impregnated the goddess of the earth or soil, Ninhursag. This union of water and earth gave rise

to vegetation, represented by the birth of the goddess of plants, Ninsar. Enki subsequently mated first

with his daughter, then with his granddaughter, to produce various specific plants and plant products.

Ninhursag, angered when Enki devoured eight of the new plants before she had the opportunity to

name them, pronounced a curse on him. Fearing the consequences of Enki’s demise (apparently a

drying up of the waters), the other gods prevailed on Ninhursag to withdraw the curse and heal Enki

of the various ailments induced by the curse, which she did by giving birth to eight healing deities,

each associated with a part of the body—thus accounting for the origin of the healing arts.

It will be convenient to pause for a moment on the healing arts, which can serve to illustrate some

important characteristics of oral cultures. There can be no doubt that healing practices were

extremely important in ancient oral cultures, where primitive conditions made disease and injury

everyday realities.

Minor medical problems, such as wounds and lesions, were no doubt treated by

family members. More dramatic ailments—major wounds, broken bones, severe and unexpected

illness—might require assistance from somebody with more advanced knowledge and skill. A certain

amount of medical specialization thus came into existence: some members of the tribe or the village

became known for herb-gathering ability, proficiency in the setting of bones or the treatment of

wounds, or experience in assisting at childbirth.

But so described, the primitive medicine practiced in preliterate societies sounds remarkably like

a rudimentary version of modern medicine. A more careful look reveals the healing arts within oral

cultures to be inseparable and indistinguishable from religion and magic. The “wise woman” or the

“medicine man” was valued not simply for pharmaceutical or surgical skill, but also for knowledge

of the divine and demonic causes of disease and the magical and religious rituals by which it could be

treated. If the problem was a splinter, a wound, a familiar rash, a digestive complaint, or a broken

bone, the healer responded in the obvious way—by removing the splinter, binding the wound,

applying a substance (if one were known) that would counteract the rash, issuing dietary prohibitions,

and setting and splinting the broken limb. But if a family member became mysteriously and gravely

ill, one might suspect sorcery or invasion of the body by an alien spirit. In such cases, more dramatic

remedies would be called for—exorcism, divination, purification, songs, incantations, and other

ritualistic activities.

One last feature of belief in oral cultures (both ancient and contemporary) demands our attention—

namely, the simultaneous acceptance of what seem to us incompatible alternatives, without any

apparent awareness that such behavior could present a problem. Examples are innumerable, but it

may suffice to note that the story of the nine Woots related above is one of seven (or more) myths of

origin that circulate among the Kuba, while the Egyptians had a variety of alternatives to the story of

Atum, Shu, Tefnut, and their offspring; and nobody seemed to notice, or else to care, that all of them

could not be true. Add to this the seemingly “fanciful” nature of many of the beliefs described above,

and the question of “primitive mentality” is inevitably raised: did the members of preliterate societies

possess a mentality that was prelogical or mystical or in some other way different from our own; and,

if so, exactly how is this mentality to be described and explained?

This is an extremely complex and difficult problem that has been hotly debated by anthropologists

and others for the better part of the past century, and I am not likely to resolve it here. But I can at

least offer a word of methodological advice: namely, that it is wasted effort, contributing absolutely

nothing to the cause of understanding, to spend time wishing that preliterate people had employed a

conception and criteria of knowledge that they had never encountered—a conception, in the case of

prehistoric people, that was not invented until centuries later. We make no progress by assuming that

preliterate people were trying, but failing, to live up to our conceptions of knowledge and truth. It

requires only a moment of reflection to realize that they were operating within quite a different

linguistic and conceptual world, and with different purposes; and it is in the light of these that their

achievements must be judged.

The stories embodied in oral traditions are intended to convey and reinforce the values and

attitudes of the community, to offer satisfying explanations of the major features of the world as

experienced by the community, and to legitimate the current social structure; stories enter the oral

tradition (the collective memory) because of their effectiveness in achieving those ends, and as long

as they continue to do so there is no reason to question them. There are no rewards for skepticism in

such a social setting and few resources to facilitate challenge. Indeed, our highly developed

conceptions of truth and the criteria that a claim must satisfy in order to be judged true (internal

coherence, for example, or correspondence with an external reality) do not generally exist in oral

cultures and, if explained to a member of an oral culture, would be greeted with incomprehension.

Rather, the operative principle among preliterates is that of sanctioned belief—the sanction in

question emerging from community consensus.

Finally, if we are to understand the development of science in antiquity and the Middle Ages, we

must ask how the preliterate patterns of belief that we have been examining yielded to, or were

supplemented by, a new conception of knowledge and truth (represented most clearly in the

principles of Aristotelian logic and the philosophical tradition it spawned). A necessary condition, if

not the full explanation, was the invention of writing, which occurred in a series of steps. First there

were pictographs, in which the written sign stood for the object itself. Around 3000 B.C. a system of

word signs (or logograms) appeared, in which signs were created for the important words, as in

Egyptian hieroglyphics. But in hieroglyphic writing, signs could also stand for sounds or syllables—

the beginnings of syllabic writing. The development of fully syllabic systems about 1500 B.C. (that is,

systems in which all nonsyllabic signs were discarded) made it possible and, indeed, reasonably easy

for people to write down everything they could say. And finally, fully alphabetic writing, which has a

sign for each sound (both consonants and vowels), made its appearance in Greece about 800 B.C. and

became widely disseminated in Greek culture in the sixth and fifth centuries.

One of the critical contributions of writing, especially alphabetic writing, was to provide a means

for the recording of oral traditions, thereby freezing what had hitherto been fluid, translating fleeting

audible signals into enduring visible objects.

Writing thus served a storage function, replacing

memory as the principal repository of knowledge. This had the revolutionary effect of opening

knowledge claims to the possibility of inspection, comparison, and criticism. Presented with a

written account of events, we can compare it with other (including older) written accounts of the

same events, to a degree unthinkable within an exclusively oral culture. Such comparison encourages

skepticism and, in antiquity, helped to create the distinction between truth, on the one hand, and myth

or legend, on the other; that distinction, in turn, called for the formulation of criteria by which

truthfulness could be ascertained; and out of the effort to formulate suitable criteria emerged rules of

reasoning, which offered a foundation for serious philosophical activity.

But giving permanent form to the spoken word does not merely encourage inspection and criticism.

It also makes possible new kinds of intellectual activity that have no counterparts (or only weak ones)

in an oral culture. Jack Goody has argued convincingly that early literate cultures produced large

quantities of written inventories and other kinds of lists (mostly for administrative purposes), far

more elaborate than anything an oral culture could conceivably produce; and, moreover, that these

lists made possible new kinds of inspection and called for new thought processes or new ways of

organizing thoughts. For one thing, the items in a list are removed from the context that gives them

meaning in the world of oral discourse, and in that sense they have become abstractions. And in this

abstract form they can be separated, sorted, and classified according to a variety of criteria, thereby

giving rise to innumerable questions not likely to be raised in an oral culture. To give a single

example, the lists of precise celestial observations assembled by early Babylonians could never have

been collected and transmitted in oral form; their existence in writing, which allowed them to be

minutely examined and compared, made possible the discovery of intricate patterns in the motions of

the celestial bodies, which we associate with the beginnings of mathematical astronomy and

astrology.

Two conclusions may be drawn from this argument. First, the invention of writing was a

prerequisite for the development of philosophy and science in the ancient world. Second, the degree

to which philosophy and science flourished in the ancient world was, to a very significant degree, a

function of the efficiency of the system of writing (alphabetic writing having a great advantage over

all of the alternatives) and the breadth of its diffusion among the people. We see the earliest benefits

of the use of word signs or logograms in Egypt and Mesopotamia, beginning about 3000 B.C.

However, the difficulty and inefficiency of logographic writing inevitably limited its diffusion and

made it the property of a small scholarly elite. In sixth- and fifth-century Greece, by contrast, the wide

dissemination of alphabetic writing contributed to the spectacular development of philosophy and

science. We must not imagine that literacy was sufficient of itself to produce the “Greek miracle” of

the sixth and fifth centuries; other factors no doubt contributed, including prosperity, new principles

of social and political organization, contact with Eastern cultures, and the introduction of a

competitive style into Greek intellectual life. But surely a fundamental element in the mix was the

emergence of Greece as the world’s first widely literate culture.

THE BEGINNINGS OF SCIENCE IN EGYPT AND MESOPOTAMIA

The earliest roots of what would become Western science are to be found in ancient Mesopotamia

(the region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, site of ancient Babylonia and Assyria) and

Egypt (the Nile River and its environs) —see map 4.1. I have said enough about creation myths in the

preceding section to reveal key features of Egyptian and Mesopotamian cosmogony (concerned with

the origins of the universe) and cosmology (concerned with the structure of the universe). Here I will

restrict myself to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian contribution to several other disciplines that

subsequently found a place within Greek and medieval European science: mathematics, astronomy,

and medicine. The evidence is scanty by comparison with materials available on Greek science, but

sufficient to convey a general picture.

The Greeks themselves believed that mathematics originated in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Herodotus (fifth century B.C.) reported that Pythagoras traveled to Egypt, where he was introduced

by priests to the mysteries of Egyptian mathematics. From there, according to ancient tradition, he

was carried captive to Babylon, where he came into contact with Babylonian mathematics. Eventually

he made his way home to the island of Samos, bearing gifts of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematical

treasure to the Greeks. Whether this and similar tales regarding other mathematicians are historically

accurate or legendary is less important than the larger truth they convey—namely, that the Greeks

were (and knew they were) the beneficiaries of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematical knowledge.

By about 3000 B.C., the Egyptians developed a number system that was decimal in character,

employing a different symbol for each power of 10 (1, 10, 100, and so forth). These symbols could be

lined up, as in Roman numerals, to form any desired number. Thus if | represented 1, and ∩

represented 10, then the number 34 could be expressed as ||||∩∩∩. By about 1800 B.C. additional

symbols had been devised for other numbers, so that, for example, 7 could be represented by a sickle

rather than by seven vertical strokes. Addition and subtraction were simple operations in Egyptian

arithmetic, performed as with Roman numerals, but multiplication and division were extremely

clumsy; and the generalized concept of a fraction was unknown, the general rule allowing only unit

fractions (fractions with a numerator of 1). Elementary problems of the following type could be

solved: if one-seventh of a quantity is added to the quantity, and the sum equals 16, how large is the

quantity?

Egyptian geometrical knowledge appears to have been oriented toward practical problems,

including those of surveyors and builders. Egyptians were able to calculate the areas of simple plane

figures, such as the triangle and the rectangle, and the volumes of simple solids, such as the pyramid.

For example, to find the area of a triangle they took one-half the length of the base times the altitude;

and, to find the volume of a pyramid, one-third the area of the base times the altitude. For calculating

the area of a circle, the Egyptians worked out rules that correspond to a value for π of about 3.17.

Finally, in one of the most obvious areas of applied mathematics, the Egyptians devised an official

calendar consisting of twelve months of thirty days each, plus an additional five days at the end of the

year—a calendar substantially simpler, because of its fixed character, than contemporary Babylonian

calendars and those of the early Greek city-states, which attempted to take into account the lunar, as

well as the solar, cycle.

The contemporary mathematical achievement in Mesopotamia was an order of magnitude superior

to that of the Egyptians. Clay tablets (see fig. 1.1) recovered in large quantities reveal a Babylonian

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