History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c82.71.2

v6.c82.71.2

Human mind is the same everywhere, its environment and the needs of human beings are often the same and no people, ancient or modern, can be regarded as having had the monopoly of great intellectual powers. Most of those who wrote on Indian literature and subjects in the 19th century were nurtured on the literature of the Greeks and Romans and on the vaunted superiority of the ancient Greeks in Philosophy, Mathematics, arts and other matters and of Egypt. But as ancient cuneiform tablets in Babylonia and the Middle East countries came to be deciphered, things began to be seen in proper perspective. Modern scholars have, it is refreshing to note, outgrown the stage when all arts were traced to Greek (see 'Sumerians' by Sir Leonard Woolley, 1928 p. 193, Glanville in 'Legacy of Egypt' p. 160 for the debt the Greeks owed to Egypt). Sir Thomas Heath was obliged to admit that the debt of the Greeks to the Babylonians was much greater than had been imagined.⁶⁹⁴ Sarton in 'a History of Science' (London, 1953) has to say that it is childish to assume that science began in Greek (Preface p. IX).