Can one argue that Ancient Egypt was more advanced than Ancient Rome

[mightfire500]

when both are at their peaks?

in terms of military, political orgainization, technology etc.

 

[schlaufuchs]

um, no?

better metallurgy, better trade routes, better modes of transportation, better political media, larger populations, better agricultural techniques...in ways that can be objectively measured, no the Egyptians were by no means more advanced assuming you're referring to, what? 3rd, 4th dynasty?

 

[Kyriakos]

The Ptolemaic empire was more advanced than Rome, as were the other greek kingdoms and empires

 

[mightfire500]

The Ptolemaic empire was more advanced than Rome, as were the other greek kingdoms and empires

well didn't Ancient Greece essentially steal all their mathematics, science, philosophy from Ancient Egypt and the Babylonians

 

[Plotinus]

well didn't Ancient Greece essentially steal all their mathematics, science, philosophy from Ancient Egypt and the Babylonians

No, and even if they had, that wouldn't be "stealing" any more than we're currently "stealing" from the Romans by using their alphabet.

 

[Kyriakos]

Yeah

Long story short: math 'theorems' (ie proving something based on set axioms) doesn't seem to have been there prior to Thales, so not in Egyptian-Babylonian math. What is known is that those cultures (and concurrent ones) had more practical math, ie a famous example is that they knew of the pythagorean theorem being likely true, but no proof was provided.
Moreover those cultures (much like Persia, India and the Druidic ones) had closed upper societies (eg priests, or chaldeans, druids, magoi etc) as keepers of knowledge anyway, again a massive difference from greek philosophy (despite Pythagoras being near that in this respect, having a cultist group and outer groups).

No need to take our word for it either. A famous ancient (roman era) book on this exact subject (origin of philosophy, which obviously includes math theorems etc) was by Diogenes Laertios (Lives of prominent philosophers etc), written iirc in the 2nd century AD. The opening chapter focuses on juxtaposition between greek and other types of "sage" knowledge presentation and nature.

 

[Flying Pig]

um, no?

better metallurgy, better trade routes, better modes of transportation, better political media, larger populations, better agricultural techniques...in ways that can be objectively measured, no the Egyptians were by no means more advanced assuming you're referring to, what? 3rd, 4th dynasty?

By the time you're using the word 'advanced', you're flying far away from what can be objectively measured. It quite obviously doesn't mean 'complicated': nobody says that the hugely complicated family structures of a lot of tribal societies are more 'advanced' than the 2.4 kids and a Labrador model of the nuclear family.

 

[mightfire500]

No, and even if they had, that wouldn't be "stealing" any more than we're currently "stealing" from the Romans by using their alphabet.

it was just

some guy a while back told me that ancient greek thinkers stole all the knowledge from egypt or something like that

 

[schlaufuchs]

By the time you're using the word 'advanced', you're flying far away from what can be objectively measured. It quite obviously doesn't mean 'complicated': nobody says that the hugely complicated family structures of a lot of tribal societies are more 'advanced' than the 2.4 kids and a Labrador model of the nuclear family.

Which is why I avoided criteria like that.

Iron/Steel (depending on what you're defining as "ancient Rome") is objectively better than bronze

Quinqueremes are, I would presume, objectively better than ships from the 3rd millennium

1st/2nd century CE trade routes were objectively more widespread and more numerous than those of the 3rd millennium

1st/2nd century CE population was ostensibly larger, as was urbanization

As you well know I despise the term "advanced" and ranking "civilizations" like some kind of masturbatory power rankings exercise. It's silly, Whiggish, and in most context quite simply impossible to do. Political structures arise to satisfy the political demands of the context, and given the persistence of the culture and the extent of the monumental building projects which occurred in Ancient Egypt, it's quite apparent that Ancient Egypt's political organization was quite effective for the challenges of its day. But in this circumstance there are criteria that can be evaluated, particularly in the military and political department. Weaponry, agricultural techniques, and access to political media and manpower ostensibly changed from 2500 BCE to 50 CE and it changed in ways that are quantifiably better than the predecessor.

So yes I'm still saying this is dumb and kind of a silly question, but I'm also trying to answer the question at least within the bounds of what can actually be answered.

 

[REDY]

Do ancient Egyptians rationalised their knowledge in books and such?

There were surely some parts of medicine, architecture or agriculture which Egyptians seem to know better than Romans, but wasnt it more coming from specific needs rather than advancement?

 

[Cutlass]

The Egyptians built some great monuments. But I don't see how they could be called as advanced in building, architecture and engineering, as the Romans. Their agriculture was a system of irrigation canals built around the considerably predictable flooding of the Nile. So while it was good work, it wasn't necessarily advanced work.

For other things, keep in mind that in coming later, Rome was able to learn much of what other people knew, and then build on from there.

 

[Flying Pig]

The Egyptians built some great monuments. But I don't see how they could be called as advanced in building, architecture and engineering, as the Romans. Their agriculture was a system of irrigation canals built around the considerably predictable flooding of the Nile. So while it was good work, it wasn't necessarily advanced work.

I'd be wary of saying that 'more difficult' or 'more complicated' are the same as 'more advanced', which is pretty generally a synonym for 'better'. Most of the tools on my work-bench would have been reasonably familiar to a tradesman hundreds or even thousands of years ago, and I could certainly explain the rest to him without much trouble, but they're still the best for the job. Complicated systems might be proof of advancement, but the lack of them isn't proof of non-advancement.

 

[Cutlass]

Fair point. But ancient Egypt left behind a lot of evidence of what they were capable of. As did Rome. So I think there's enough their to make an objective call.

 

[Flying Pig]

Yes, but only of the form 'a more advanced society is one which uses more complex methods of engineering and longer trade routes (or something like that): we have more evidence of these from Ancient Rome than we have for Ancient Egypt, so Ancient Rome is more advanced'. The problem is with the word 'advanced', which you always have to cut down and clarify such that you end up fitting it to the evidence you have. There's an old book by an archaeologist called Gordon Childe, who studied the ancient Near East, and wrote a book on it. In that book, he declared that he was going to investigate whether the Near East could be called 'civilised', and so produced a checklist of ten criteria of civilization (you can see them here) - which of course just happened to coincide with the material he'd been studying from the Near East for his whole life.

 

[Yeekim]

To argue that Egypt was more advanced than Rome, one would have to bring examples of what knowledge got "lost".

 

[Kyriakos]

Even if their closed-up top casts (priests etc) had some knowledge others weren't allowed to learn, it still seems pretty obvious that they had no system or will to expand knowledge out of a tiny circle of said casts/cults. Very unlike ancient Greece.

Re Rome, other than building (expanding on greek) models/methods, they do not seem to have been expanding much in other fields, such as math, physics (physical philosophy), or weapon-related tech (greek fire likely was there already, just guessing here though..Herodotos does mention a fire-spewing machine the thebans built to take over fort Delion during the first part of the Pelop war, but that may not have been actually liquid fire).

Of course there was a numerical expanse of literate people, but probably not with similar per capita stats as in ancient Greece.

 

[Nexlev]

I would rather argue for the Persians, but the Library of Alexandria - we don't know what was in it.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Of course we will never have a complete accounting but we can still have a pretty good picture of what was in the Great Library. Lots of junk (by today's standards), plays, poetry and a smattering of math. Certainly no 'lost secrets' so to speak.

Also, I'm not buying that ancient Greece was particularly keen on public education of any kind. If you were rich, sure, you could get a decent one for you or your kids. But I've never seen any evidence that they had any system to expand that knowledge to the general public or were even that much more into civic life than anyone else at the time. For the rich, land-owning men maybe in some cities that was the case. But I doubt it was anything close to a universal mentality as it often gets portrayed.

 

[Flying Pig]

It absolutely wasn't - being educated, able to read, understand philosophy and so on was a huge part of how the rich and powerful marked themselves out from ordinary people. 'Public education' would have destroyed the whole point of it.

 

[Kyriakos]

It absolutely wasn't - being educated, able to read, understand philosophy and so on was a huge part of how the rich and powerful marked themselves out from ordinary people. 'Public education' would have destroyed the whole point of it.

Wait, that is very misleading. There was mandatory primary education in any Polis we know of, including Sparta and its own agoge. Said education featured basic arithmetic, language and gymnastics. Of course higher education started with the sophists in Athens in such a manner (if you could afford them, you bought more education for your children), and Plato's academy was the first higher education institute (followed by similar ones, eg the Garden), but you couldn't enter there if you were without basic knowledge. In fact even the phrase outside Plato's academy read: "let no one enter if he is not knowledgeable in geometry".

Also keep in mind that the term "mathematics", was originally "mathemata" (Plato uses that as well), which literally means 'lessons' They were the core of primary education in that level.