Knowledge in Archaic Greece.

How did philosophy and science first emerge in Ionia, at the eastern limits of the Archaic Greek cultural sphere? What forms of knowledge made possible the remarkable intellectual innovations associated with Thales, Anaximandros, Anaximenes, Pherekydes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Herakleitos, and their successors? Bringing together contributions from leading international scholars, this volume, edited by the historian of Ancient philosophy Robert Hahn and the Classical archaeologist Alexander Marian Herda, explores the cultural, technological, mathematical, religious, political, and intellectual contexts of seventh/sixth-century BCE Ionia. Drawing on archaeology, architecture, astronomy, engineering, literacy studies, mathematics, meteorology, numismatics, crafting textiles, urbanism, and the history of ideas, the essays illuminate the many sources from which early Greek rationality emerged. Taken together, these studies invite a fresh reconsideration of the origins of philosophy and science and of the forms of knowledge that transformed the Greek understanding of nature, humanity, and the cosmos. They also suggest that practical skills and technical achievements (technai), taken over from the Near Eastern cultures, first of all Mesopotamia and Egypt, revealed stable patterns underlying the changing world of experience, helping to explain how the earliest philosophers came to posit fundamental principles (archai) underlying all things.