The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.137

c9.s2.137

In fact they went far beyond this; they put at Greek service the material they had accumulated and the discoveries they had made in their own special science, astronomy; some Babylonians translated Babylonian astronomical texts into Greek for Greek use,¹ and it is now well known that Hellenistic astronomy was not purely Greek but essentially Graeco-Babylonian,² even if some details are still matter of acute controversy.³ That astronomy is perhaps the one instance in antiquity of true scientific co-operation between different peoples; and by that, even had there been nothing else, Alexander was justified of his work. It must for a time have looked as if Babylonia was going to be hellenised or at any rate was hellenisable, and as if her future might lie with the West and not with the East; and some Romans from Caesar to Trajan dreamt of pushing forward the frontier from the Euphrates to the Tigris and incorporating Babylonia in the Roman empire.