David SAUSSIER

Long before the rise of theoretical science, people in Antiquity developed practical skills essential to their survival:

• Agriculture and irrigation: Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations, through observation of the floods of the Nile or the Tigris and Euphrates, created agricultural calendars and complex irrigation systems.
• Architecture and engineering: the construction of pyramids, ziggurats, or Roman aqueducts required empirical knowledge of geometry, mechanics, and work organization.
• Primitive medicine: plant-based remedies and rudimentary surgical techniques appeared very early, often associated with religious beliefs.

This knowledge was pragmatic, passed down orally or through technical texts, but without a true attempt at rational explanation of natural phenomena.

The first great civilizations developed remarkable knowledge, mainly for practical and religious purposes:

• In Egypt, astronomy was used to predict the Nile's floods and to organize agricultural activities.
  The Egyptians excelled in geometry for the construction of pyramids and in medicine, as shown by medical papyri (Ebers Papyrus, Edwin Smith Papyrus).
  Their medicine was already relatively advanced, with practices such as sutures, dental prosthetics, and diagnostic methods.
• In Mesopotamia, Babylonian priest-astronomers observed the stars and developed the first calculation systems to predict eclipses and the positions of planets.
  Their sexagesimal system (base 60) is still present today in the way we measure time (60 minutes, 60 seconds) and angles (360°).

However, these cultures remained dominated by religion: natural phenomena were interpreted as divine will rather than as processes obeying natural laws.

It was in Ancient Greece that theoretical science truly emerged, distinct from religion.
Greek thinkers, called natural philosophers, sought to explain the universe through reason and observation rather than through myths.
They asked the first fundamental questions: What is matter? What are the causes of phenomena?

Thales of Miletus (6th century BC), considered one of the very first scientists, explained earthquakes and the origin of the universe without reference to the divine. Pythagoras developed a vision of a universe governed by numbers and proportions, opening the way to pure mathematics. Hippocrates, the father of rational medicine, introduced the idea that diseases have natural, not supernatural, causes. Aristotle, a major philosopher, proposed a classification of living beings and a global vision of the cosmos. Even though some of his theories were later proven wrong, they dominated scientific thought for over a millennium.
Archimedes invented machines and discovered the principles of buoyancy in fluids.

The Romans, more pragmatic, adopted Greek knowledge and applied it to practical achievements: roads, aqueducts, baths, military systems, urban planning...
They excelled in engineering but contributed few new scientific theories.

Thanks to the political and military power of Rome, this knowledge spread throughout the empire, paving the way for its transmission to medieval Europe.

With the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD), Western Europe entered a period of intellectual decline: the Early Middle Ages.
However, Greek and Roman knowledge did not disappear entirely:

• It was preserved in the Byzantine Empire (Constantinople).
• It was translated and enriched by Arab-Muslim scholars, notably in Baghdad and Cordoba, during the Islamic Golden Age (see Science in the Middle Ages).
• Later, in the 12th century, these texts were transmitted back to Europe through Latin translations, triggering the intellectual Renaissance.

Antiquity was a foundational period:

• The first techniques and structured observations appeared.
• Greek thought introduced logic and theory.
• The Roman Empire ensured the large-scale spread of knowledge.

But a crucial element took place after the fall of Rome:
while Western Europe went through several centuries of intellectual decline, scholars of the Arab-Muslim world played an essential role in preserving and enriching ancient knowledge. In great cities like Baghdad, Damascus, Cordoba, or Cairo, they translated Greek, Persian, and Indian texts into Arabic, while commenting on and improving them.
Figures such as Al-Khwarizmi, Avicenna, Averroes, and Ibn al-Haytham laid the foundations of algebra, modern medicine, optics, and the experimental method.

This knowledge, later passed on to Europe via Spain and Sicily in the 12th century, became the starting point of the Scientific Renaissance.
Without this heritage, the European scientific revolution led by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton would never have been possible.

Thus, the history of science is that of a long dialogue between civilizations, where each culture played a role in the universal quest for truth.
From Mesopotamia to Greece, from the Arab-Muslim world to modern Europe, humanity gradually built the foundations of contemporary science.