thought for the day/ ancient wonders, knowledge, and technology

This is Khufu's ship which was found around his Pyramid.  I bring this up because it seems to me that outside of architecture, timekeeping of some kind(sun-dials), and some other stuff like horse riding, boats were the only real technology before the steam engine.

If you look at James Burke's "Connections", you see what ancient technologies?  Not much.   Similarly, what science before Galileo and Kepler?  Aristarchus's sun centered cosmology(now lost; we only have a mention of it by Archimedes).  Yes, there was mythological ideas about the earth and origins of the life and the universe.  But, for the most part, without mathematics, there was no science or technology beyond stone axes or even bronz or iron axes. 

I've already categorized the history of technology that James Burke presents in his "Connections" as gears which depends on euclidean geometry, or the technology that comes from daming up nature such as agriculture bringing about issues of irrigation, pest control, or keeping the soil good to go(I don't know why I have trouble remembering the technical name here!).  I've already argued the connections of this with how mathematics works and Jacob Bronowski's ideas.  The reason why I want to bring this all up again is to say that outside of architecture and boats and a few other things that clearly depends on mathematical thinking, the only other knowledge of interest pre-Galileo age was mathematics!

People in the eighteen hundreds discovered Egypt; the Egyptian findings were viewed with fascination of a civilization alien yet technologicaly sophisticated before their times.  Since then, there's always an effort to say that civilization goes back further than anybody has dreamt of; they even go so far as to suggest that those who think Egypt were ancient civilization before say classical Greek times are non-imaginative and standerdized and so on and so forth(in the 1900s, due to rocketry and astronomy, people started hoping for alien life more sophisticated than us; and, there's been a ufo craze ever since!).  Yet, none of these ancient wisdom seekers ever look towards mathematics of the ancient times as the place to turn to learn of a long lost wealth of knowledge.  You never see documentaries of the great mathematics of the Babylonians before the Greeks for the most part just put in terms of axiomatic deductive system.

I point this out to reiterate the central role of mathematics in the human condition now and back then. The mathematical wonders of the ancients are the real wonders of the past.  The great technological wonders of the ancients as nobody would really argue are mathematical in inspiration - think stonehenge and the Egyptian Pyramids. But, the mathematical wonders are greater in quantity and quality than all the rest of the ancient wonders.

I've already given a writup of Van Der Waerden's "Science Awakening" early on in this blog.   Since this post was to be about ancient wisdom, this is a good stopping point for today!