Talk:List of Greek inventions and discoveries

Vandalism
Somebody put cranking 90s as an invention Niles and freshy (talk) 18:26, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Problematic
Lists like this one are always a bit problematic. The list purports to show "Greek" inventions. The issue is that it covers inventions from a wide range of geographies. The only thing they have in common is that the inventor of each was purportedly Greek speaking. If I invent something and I have an ancestor who is Greek, does that make me a "Greek" inventor? Unfortunately trying to link accomplishments with such tenuous relationships has inherently racist overtones. To the extent that such lists are even meaningful, it is probably better to make them based on geography rather than something so tenuous as ethnicity.

Mind you, I know that historically many reference books have grouped things in this same way, but frankly we do know that a lot of the ways things have traditionally been grouped are based on outdated (and sometimes bigoted) ideas.

-- 165.204.84.11 (talk) 20:27, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

It depends on the era and even recorded ancestries/genealogies of known inventors. Greek inventions of the Classical period were undoubtedly mostly those of ethnic Greeks unless otherwise stated. That becomes more difficult to pin down during the Hellenistic period after Ptolemaic Alexandria became a major source of innovation outside Athens, Rhodes, Syracuse, etc. In some cases, without an explicit genealogy, this becomes near impossible to determine in the Roman era when the Eastern Mediterranean was thoroughly Hellenized in culture. By the mid Imperial period, West Asiatic peoples who once spoke various Semitic languages like Aramaic had become largely assimilated and the same thing happened for Romanized Iranians who had long been literate in both Greek and Iranian thanks to the cosmopolitan Seleucids. After the Romans took Egypt, a similar level of Romanization & Hellenization for a huge number of northern native Egyptians who obtained Roman citizenship is evidenced by literary records as well as artworks of toga-wearing Fayum mummies (many of whom lived before all freemen of the Roman Empire were granted citizenship in 212 AD). Pericles of Athens Talk 01:42, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

Even before the birth of Alexander the Great, the colonial Greek world stretched from the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea to the coasts of Spain and France. However, there was a core area in the central Mediterranean where most of these technological and scientific developments occurred during the Classical period. This stretched further east and south in the Hellenistic period after Alexander's conquests of the Persian Empire. Most of the listed inventions and inventors were either from mainland Greece, Anatolia (Turkey), or Magna Graecia (southern Italy and Sicily). For instance, we know that the first torsion artillery pieces were developed in Syracuse and then Pella. Athenians produced the majority of Greek scientific literature during the Classical period, which shifted elsewhere during the Hellenistic era to Alexandria, Rhodes and Pergamon (see Cuomo, Serafina, "Ancient Written Sources for Engineering and Technology" in  The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 17–20). Pericles of Athens Talk 01:42, 9 October 2021 (UTC)