Hacker News Reader

> Or Ancient Greece (and later Rome), some 500 years before the monasteries.

And we know this because monasteries kept a large army of monks guarding the knowledge so that it would one day serve society.

View on HN

Much of ancient Greek knowledge comes to us because the Arabs preserved it. Some of them were Christians of course (so the occasional monastery may have been involved) but mostly not.

A more accurate description of that history is that the Christian Byzantine empire preserved it but it came to us from the Arabs as a result of it taking a foreign invasion to get Greek Christians and The West to talk to one another after 1054

Yes, the Arabs keep some, Europeans keep others. That’s why I use the word “much” in the beginning of my statement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com