Can you cite some "pro western supremaciests" you refer to? It honestly sounds like you are just making stuff up to try to demonize other people.
Ask yourself why names like Al Kindi and Kandiaronk are unfamiliar or unlikely to be familiar to you -- or Western statecraft begins at Plato or Weber rather than its grounding in Chinese statecraft brought over mostly by Leibniz. Which Arab scientists inspired Kepler and his predecessors and why are you unlikely to have learned that history -- even though it's been known for over a century.
If you're genuinely interested here are maybe some places to start: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0948GPBBH/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... (Dawn of Everything by Graeber) https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/islamic-world https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XXY491X/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... (Orientalism by Said)
edit: here's a popular article detailing an example of how concerted and conscious this process is and then 'lost to history' due to the layers of our educational environment: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh...
But in most cases it does seem that in many cases Greek astronomers really did travel to either Egypt or Babylonia to learn astronomy and mathematics and were quite open about it. There's a story about how Eudoxus, who was very poor for a Greek philosopher, had to raise funds from his friends to afford to travel to Egypt and study with the priests there. After seeing the observatory that the Egyptians used he decided to build one of his own in Cnidos.
Ptolemy was also explicit about the fact that he used Babylonian records to validate his planetary model (though he complains about their quality in places).
None of this is to say that by the early modern era Western scholars had neglected eastern influences. But the Greeks themselves were very willing to acknowledge their eastern influences.
The Greeks, whether willful or lazy, didn't seem to reliably understand with much precision the cultures they discussed. A favorite example of mine is how we hear of the "Hanging Gardens of Bablyon" (edit: instead of Nineveh) seems mostly to be from the Greeks not caring much the difference between one city and another in the Middle East.[1] (where it also seems "Archimedes' Screw" should also be attributed to someone else).
These sources mention they're not original, but both contemporary all the way to modern secondary sources then reference the Greek or other 'Western' person that introduced this concept. Even when conscious of the more complicated origin, it's justified by having a common reference or more easily pronounceable/culturally relevant name.
As a ~sibling comment~ (edit: your comment) then mentions, later secondary critics become skeptical that the author really had a past attribution or were they trying to give better authority to their own ideas (or in Kondiaronk's case, to add deniability for possibly heretical or treasonous ideas).
And then modern glosses use the excuse of summarizing the Western intellectual history -- so what if Al Kindi came up with the first correct understanding of how optics works -- what matters is what Europeans read in Aristotle and later in Newton, etc.
Credit and real history are available, but they are discussed incredibly rarely -- when the idea of a scientist in the Middle Ages is evoked, it's not someone that has learned Arabic or depends on Arabic translations to learn, but in popular media, only the original (or locally original) things are favored (lens-making, etc). Those are often genuinely great things, or genuinely changed something in Europe.
In science discourse, itself, we often favor the first named person we know that introduced a concept, but which names have been preferred goes back to that erased history that includes all of those biases.
You might swim in texts that credit the original civilizations that we know discovered these texts, but in secondary education and popular accounts they're completely erased.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
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You're all over the place here, and simply factually wrong.
Plato/Aristotle's writings on politics and statecraft predate Liebniz's interest in Chinese philosophy and politics by around 2,000 years. It is simply inarguable that the Western political tradition is grounded in them. If you mean to say that modern Western political theory and practice is more influenced by Chinese thought via Liebniz than is generally acknowledged, that is a much more defensible statement.
I'm "all over the place" because modern accounts of political theory are "all over the place" -- sometimes start with Plato and some start with Weber, but very few, if any, start with Chinese sources -- why is that? Why isn't that the most common thing we should encounter when reading about political theory?
Of course, but the West didn't have access to them until the early modern period. We're not discussing which came first, we're discussing influence.
>Why isn't that the most common thing we should encounter when reading about political theory?
This is what I meant by you being all over the place. The answer to this question really depends on the topic. If it's a general overview of political thought across time, it's true that Western works on the topic shamefully tend to ignore non-Western sources. If it's an overview of Western political thought, it makes sense to start with the sources of Western political thought and later discuss how the eventual encounters with Chinese thought changed things.
2 interesting and good reads are the cyropedia and the anabasis, both by xenophon, and neither portraying the Persians in a negative light.
Wait, you’re talking about Hollywood/ PostWW2 Western media, right? Because if we look back at how Western historians generally framed the events of the eighteenth century onwards, its almost always been of eastern and oriental cultures as being savages and it was the “White Mans Burden” to bring them the light of civilization.
I also think 18th and 19th century we working from a much more limited set of historical information. Persepolis was first excavated in the 1930s. Old Persian Cuneiform wasn't fully deciphered until around 1850 and was the basis for decipherment of other languages using cuneiform. It wasn't until then tat any primary historical texts could even be studied. Whereas Greek never disappeared and ancient greek was studied from the classical era onwards. A lot of what we knew about old Persia prior to the 1850s came from people like Xenophon who had a particular ax to grind in contemporary (to him) Greece and used Cyruus and Persia as stand in for ideas he wanted to compare and contrast with Athens and Sparta.
Sometimes nations (Greek, Roman, Persian, etc...) killed and pillaged and from the perspective of someone writing what is now histories, yes, those people doing the killing would be termed "bad guys".
> Whether you believe that is a deep set prejudice and active discrimination campaign or a natural tendency re the history of one's continent is up to you.
You can actually measure sentiment to some degree. It sounds like you are trying to mind read. Don't do that.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2019/11/6/20919221/alt-right-history-gre...
This doesn't have anything to do with western supremacists, and it very much isn't someone on "the right" talking about themselves.
I'm totally cool with reading history and trying to learn from it.
> The men who consume this stuff — and yes, it’s almost exclusively men — tend to believe two things: that ancient Greek and Roman culture are the basis of Western civilization and that these cultures are the exclusive achievements of white men.
> But the idea isn’t merely to celebrate these ancient cultures. The goal is to turn a phrase like “Western civilization” into code for “white culture” and to cement a narrative about history that glorifies patriarchy and undercuts cultural progressivism.
Your framing of the article is wildly incorrect. It makes it pretty clear that White Supremacists aren’t concerned about history in itself, but in a framing that glorifies white men. Presumably its analogous to how neo nazis revere Hitler and the Nazi party.
The goal in each case is a yearning for “better times in the past” by emulating the past days of “glory”.
It also doesn’t support the original claim: that people talk down about Babylon and Egypt, a claim that never appears in the article.
Celebrating Greece and Rome as European achievements doesn’t denigrate people from other areas. Nor does acknowledging how their philosophy filtered into European and later American thought.
The paragraph you cited sounds like a bad faith “hit piece” unrelated to the claims that are being discussed regarding Babylon and Egypt.
Honest question: isn't that specific part true?
There are many reasons not to descend into this kind of point-scoring:
- Zeroth, it's super disrespectful, all of those cultures were the first breath of civilization that we know of. I'm not an emotional guy and I'm fairly pissed off at a lot of aspects of human civilizations, but even I think that the Old Ones deserve more respect than being compared to each other in a fantasy, silly competition that nobody asked for and doesn't serve anything except satisfying petty modern grievances. ("nooo, my ancients could beat up your ancients").
- First, the premise is naive and ahistoric. The modern 'west' was shaped by countless forces, Christianity, Islam's contact, Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, colonialism, etc... Exactly zero (0) of those things happened to Classical Greece, the 'west' would be as alien a civilization to them as Persians.
When you start looking for other civilizations achievements to 'offset' the contribution of Greeks, you fail to notice that the Greeks aren't western in any reasonable sense of the word. You have been dragged into a game with fundamentally silly rules. Don't try to win silly games.
- Second, civilizations reinvent each other's wheels all the time, there is no reason why the same environment that inspired Egyptian and Babylonian scholars didn't also inspire Greek scholars.
- Third, it's exaggerated how much 'white supremacist' actually exist outside of one or more imagination. The term became meaningless. Liking your civilization more is not being supremacist, it's a natural, if misguided, instinct that is present in the vast majority of population of all cultures.
> finally reveal
You’re talking as if you know something others don’t?
So it is easily can be that Babylonians learned something from Greeks.