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Here's my chance to bore everyone stiff with the Vast Storehouse Of Knowledge I've gleaned from reading the more...interesting DU groups. Over in the A&A group, I once put forward a Modest Proposal to combine all those groups into one, under an acronym derived from A-strology, S-eekers-On-Unique-Paths, S-piritualists, H-olistics, O-therworldly...
Well, anyway, that post got deleted by the admins, so I'd better stop there. You could find that acronym in a song title by Ministry, though...
Anyway, as the woos never tire of reminding us, ancient Babylon horked up a thousand years of ASTROLOGICAL records. And where did all those records go? (Make a guess, any guess, and you will find it validated by a woo. Those records went to the Mayans! To the American Indians! To the Norse...)
Back in the real world, as us History Geeks know, the Babylonian Empire had a rather large can of whoop-ass opened on it by Alexander The Great in the Fourth Century BMOJ (Before the Myth Of Jesus).
All those centuries of astrological records apparently went to a bunch of rational Greeks working at the ancient library in Alexandria, Egypt...where, as you know since I mention it in every fricking post, I am sitting and writing this.
The Greek scholars at the Alexandria Library used those astrological records to further the science of ASTRONOMY.
Especially troublemakers like Erastothenes, who not only already proved the world was round long BMOJ, but calculated the Earth's circumference to within 50 miles. And he did all that with a simple experiment: he drove a rod into the ground at Alexandria and measured its length at high noon. Then he sent an assistant to Cylene (modern Aswan, Egypt) to do the same thing. Simple common sense told him that if the measured lengths were equal, the world was flat. If not, it wasn't.
You probably remember that it took the One True Church more than a thousand years to figure this out, and some unpleasantness with other astroNOMICAL troublemakers like Galileo.
Oddly enough, the Muslims didn't have those problems...their problems with science vs. religion came later. Muslim astronomers not only published the works of pagan astronomers like Claudius Ptolemy, it was Muslims who gave Ptolemy the name "Armagest"--The Greatest.
But Muslim astronomers also figured out where Ptolemy went wrong with his idea of "Crystal Spheres"--the only way he could square his astronomical observations with the idea of an Earth at the center of the Universe.
Some other nitpicking Ministry Song Title will have to go looking for these references. But I've read several commentaries from ancient Muslim scientists praising "pagan" scientists for pointing the way to knowledge.
Unlike the Xians, those ancient Muslims also didn't have a problem with the pagan materialist Aristotle. A few years ago, a previously undiscovered manuscript by Aristotle turned up in a library in India. It was written in Arabic.
You lucked out. I would write even more if I was sober.
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