> "Everything we found shattered our expectations....suggesting the site had a dual role as both a spiritual and a scientific place.
I've been interested for a while in the way that religion and science (mainly astronomy) are related in the ancient world.
Reading between the lines, it seems like there was a class of professional scientists who were also religious "priests". And what we now know as ancient myths partially served as a way to communicate the relevant scientific knowledge (e.g. the calendar of events relevant to raising and harvesting crops) without having to communicate where we got that information.
For example, the story we hear about Pythagoras is that he goes and studies in the Egyptian temples and then comes back and tries to make math more open source. That suggests that there is a lot of math going on in the temples, and that secrecy was a part of how they operated.
Secrecy persisted with the Pythagoreans, but that feels a bit more like a continuation of an existing tradition rather than something they invented.
I've been interested for a while in the way that religion and science (mainly astronomy) are related in the ancient world.
Reading between the lines, it seems like there was a class of professional scientists who were also religious "priests". And what we now know as ancient myths partially served as a way to communicate the relevant scientific knowledge (e.g. the calendar of events relevant to raising and harvesting crops) without having to communicate where we got that information.
For example, the story we hear about Pythagoras is that he goes and studies in the Egyptian temples and then comes back and tries to make math more open source. That suggests that there is a lot of math going on in the temples, and that secrecy was a part of how they operated.
Secrecy persisted with the Pythagoreans, but that feels a bit more like a continuation of an existing tradition rather than something they invented.