Athens vs, sparta essays

Athens vs, sparta essays In prehistoric times advice and knowledge were passed from generation to generation in an oral tradition. The development of writing systems enabled knowledge to be stored and communicated with much greater accuracy in reporting and describing facts and details, This combined with the development of agriculture which allowed for a surplus of food made it possible for early civilizations to develop; and thus, more time was devoted to tasks other than survival such as the search for knowledge. In addition, as civilizations came into contact with one another either through trade, migration, or warfare their ideas were exchange. If one said one thing and another said something else and someone else said a third thing then this gets people thinking, what is the truth? If we look at the nature of knowledge in ancient Greece we see that at first, the Greeks used gods to explain the occurrence of things, which they could not understand through lack of scientific proof. For example, they thought the gods controlled the rising and setting of the sun. Most things were explained through mythology. These were stories, which served as explanations for things in life. For example, Greek mythology was used to account for the existence of the heavens and the earth. Greek myths were stories of gods and goddesses whose quarrels and interactions with humans gave rise to those things people wished to understand. This all begins to change 600BC when Thales of Miletus and a small group of Greek thinkers ignored the mythical beliefs and set out to find out what is true. Instead of seeking the old stories to explain things, the Greek thinkers begin to explain that events in nature take place in accordance with unchanging law, rather than because it is the actions of the gods. They rejected mythological explanations and used reason to explain natural phenomena. While these early Greek philosophers were proposing that some form of matter was the ...