This is reportedly a Minoan pottery
This figure eight handle pottery gets back to Minoa, Crete again.
Minoan again
The second pottery above and this one have geometric patterning which was a predominantly later classical Greek artistic style.
This pottery has a picture of Jason bringing a golden fleece.
These three potteries are Mycenean
I've really gone at posting as many different Greek pottery to show the great creative variety in the Greek pottery art. Some are distinctive and creative in shape, others have great art on them; some have both. It's noted that there's not much in the way of classical Greek paintings; but, they did their art on Pottery.
Pottery goes back tens of thousands of years ago; but, the Mesopotamians innovated the flywheel that clay is set on. The flywheel is spun leaving the hands to shape the clay as it spins. This allowed the ancients to mass produce pottery. The Greeks turned it into high art.
Between the great flywheel technology to make pottery and the free play of patterns on them, the Greeks became inspired to mathematics? Well, it's a nice thought. But, another great point is a society that gets inspired by something from another society. Here, we have the Greeks taking from the Mesopotamians. I've found another remarkable cultural renaissance that took the best from another culture in Angkor Wat.
This isn't the video I saw; but, it's do!
- 14Sep2015 edit/thought,
People can or cannot solve problems based on what's already in their heads. It's like playing one of those maze video games, where you're going through the maze, and some of the maze is shaded out because you haven't done something to light up those parts of the maze. When people built the Stonehenge(s), they obviously had enough knowledge of the seasons to organize the stones as markers; but, 1) they built and erected the stones with stones and wood, not metal. They also obviously didn't have the mathematical knowledge to shape the stone. When people built the Pyramids around the same time, they obviously had the mathematical knowledge to more or less make things in straight lines where needed.
- Why did they build the Pyramids, or even Stonehenge, and not something else, like a telescope, or an automobile? Because those are problems they don't even know exists! And I would go so far as to say this is the problem of those who believe in gods to solve their social/psychological problems and not science. Those superstitious people don't know reason. They don't know what facts or logical reasoning is. They don't know it's even possible. They don't trust it; they become fearfull.
- What's of course interesting about Angkor Wat is how a people far away from contact with advancing cultures, totally picks up on a whole knowledge base, from another culture that probably had to do through various stages to be able to construct architecture like that. This phenomenon is related to how a person grows up in a culture; takes on the dress, style, and tone of voice of a culture. It says something about the human brain; what that is, is still a bit of a mystery.
- Getting back to the Greeks . . . The Mesopotamians and Egyptians created a certain amount of mathematics far beyond the numbers of hunter gatherers before them(that came from tens of thousands of years). But, they stalled. Why did the Greeks get infatuated with it and continue? Because they grew up with different ideas in their heads that didn't stop them from advancing. After awhile, they did stop advancing.
Perhaps a better point of the analogous relation I'm trying to indicate here is that, something like the Greek love for making pottery an artform, and the Angkor Wat architecture cannot come out of nowhere. They must have got their influence by someone else who evolved the tradition to such a great height before.
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