Greeks
Article
Greeks is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 12, 2022 and August 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “which the Greeks and Romans used for cooking, medicine, etc”; “Greeks and Romans had written down their stories”. It most often appears alongside north Africa, Romans, 538 deluxe model.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: October 12, 2022
- Last seen: August 11, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- north Africa (2 shared issues)
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- Romans (2 shared issues)
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- 538 deluxe model (1 shared issues)
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- @rcafdm (1 shared issues)
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- Achilles (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Smith (1 shared issues)
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- Africa (1 shared issues)
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- Andres (1 shared issues)
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- Ara Norenzayan (1 shared issues)
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- Asia (1 shared issues)
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- Augustine (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
32: A National Geographic article claims that a newly-discovered rare plant may be the long-thought-extinct ancient miracle herb silphium, which the Greeks and Romans used for cooking, medicine, etc. Only problem: the plant is in Turkey, and all the ancients agree silphium grew in North Africa. The article suggests that maybe Greek traders transplanted some to Turkey successfully (even though the ancients all said silphium couldn’t be transplanted). But according to Wikipedia, genetic studies show the Turkish plant is related to other Turkish plants and not to North African plants, which I think is near-fatal for this theory. Still, according to the National Geographic article, they tried the plant as a spice, and it tastes amazing (as the ancients say silphium did). Confirmation bias, or extreme good luck?
Inline links: National Geographic, according to Wikipedia
When I grew up I was still part of a primitive culture, in the following sense: my elders told me the story of how our people came to be. It started with the Greeks: Pericles the statesman, Plato the first philosopher, Herodotus the first historian, the first playwrights, and before them all Homer, the blind first poet. Before Greece, something called prehistory stretched back. There were Iron and Bronze Ages, and before that the Stone Age. These were shadowy, mysterious realms. Then history went on to Europe. I learnt as little outside Europe as I did before Greece. There was one class on 20th century China, but that too was about China becoming modern, which meant European.
The difference between Greece and Rome on the one hand, and Babylon and Egypt on the other, was that Greeks and Romans had written down their stories for us. Their stories had become our story. History was a narrative. Each of its chapters had a beginning, middle and end. How else would you tell it? Now, as we go farther back, we have less and less writing to rely on. Even when we have writing, on papyrus or stone, it isn’t self-interpreting – it’s not history the way Herodotus and Livy tell us history, with the explicit goal of recounting the past. Earlier still the texts die out completely, and we are left with stones and bones. Our knowledge of this history has to come from science: from archeology, anthropology (in the hope of using present societies to learn about past societies), and now also the new science of historical population genetics. Joe Henrich has done more than most to teach us our history using these tools. His marvelous book The Secret of Our Success told the human narrative from the point of view of the unique human capacity for cumulative culture1.