(June 16, 2012 at 4:16 am)Justtristo Wrote:(June 16, 2012 at 12:57 am)apophenia Wrote: That, and when power shifted to Rome and a church based in Latin, fewer people were around to translate the old texts from Greek into Latin, so the texts were still around, but nobody could read them. The situation in Muslim countries was a little different, so there were Arabic translations of the Greek texts, and some of the Latin translations of Greek texts were from the Arabic rather than the original Greek.
Actually much the same process as I have described occurred in the Greek speaking Eastern Roman Empire as well, though to a lesser extent. For example a codex containing works of Archimedes found in what is now Istanbul had Christian prayers overwritten on it.
(June 14, 2012 at 1:36 am)Minimalist Wrote: The Greeks, of course.
I once heard a preacher/university campus evangelist on a local Gospel radio station talk about Eratosthenes and how Isaiah beat him to the punch around 400 years earlier. The man quoted Isaiah 40:22 to make his case.
It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;
Isaiah 40:22 (English Standard Version)
I don't he realized despite his four year education at a bible college, that the verse actually implies a flat earth. Which can be confirmed by reading other biblical verses which describe the Earth in the same way.
The section of Isiah that this is in ( Deutero-Isiah) was written near the end of the Babylonian captivity ( according to modern scholars ), which is around the middle of the 6th century BCE. The Greek philosophers proposed a spherical earth at least 50 years earlier than this, so he's even more wrong than you thought he was.
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. - J.R.R Tolkien