It was wise of Teresi, a science
writer and former editor of Omni
magazine, to establish his
bona fides as a skeptic at the
outset. He calls “Lost Discove-
ries” a book of “unkempt historical
details,” but in surveying the non-
Western roots of science he has
created a very neat chronicle --
and a timely reminder -- of how
much of the foundation of modern
scientific thought and technological
development was built by the mostly
overlooked contributions of Arabs,
Indians, Chinese, Polynesians and
Mesoamericans. How timely? A
dozen pages into the text, I found
myself wondering how many
publishers would have been
courageous enough, after Sept.
11, 2001, to take on a book that
documents, among other things,
the superiority of Arab intellect
and Muslim science in ancient
and medieval times.

The “standard model” of the
history of science locates its
birth around 600 B.C. in ancient
Greece, where the dramatis
personae typically include
Pythagoras, Empedocles,
Democritus, Aristotle and
other sages, who laid the modern
foundation for math and the
sciences. It was this foundation,
buried during the Middle Ages,
that was rediscovered during the
Renaissance. What were the
peoples of India, Egypt, Mesopo-
tamia, sub-Saharan Africa, China
and the Americas doing all this
time? “They discovered fire, then
called it quits,” Teresi observes
sarcastically. He admits starting
this exercise “with the purpose of
showing that the pursuit of evidence
of nonwhite science is a fruitless
endeavor.... Six years later, I was
still finding examples of ancient
and medieval non-Western
science that equaled and often
surpassed ancient Greek learning.”

This catalog of achievement, while
not exactly news, is breathtaking
in the sheer sweep of human
ingenuity. The Babylonians deve-
loped the Pythagorean theorem
at least 1,500 years before Pytha-
goras was born. Indian mathema-
ticians performed multiplication
and algebra, and even ventured
toward calculus, a millennium
before Europeans. An Arab astro-
nomer, Ibn al-Shatir, spelled out
the theory of planetary motion 150
years before Copernicus. The
“Mercator projection” was used by
Chinese cartographers centuries
before the birth of Mercator. In the
third century B.C., physicists in
China pretty neatly summarized
Newton’s first law of motion.
…

The larger question underlying
“Lost Discoveries” is why this
astonishing record of human
achievement has been
ignored or dismissed for so long.
Part of our reluctance to
acknowledge it may stem,
understandably, from cultural
pride, although this has
sometimes expressed itself
in ungenerous ways. Teresi
notes that Morris Kline, a
prominent American historian
of mathematics, once
dismissed the mathematical
achievements of the Egyptians
and Babylonians as “the
scrawling of children just learning
how to write,” and the British
historian of science G. R. Kaye
is quoted here exhorting his
colleagues to search for and
celebrate “traces of Greek
influence” in the history of know-
ledge. “Our pop science historians
-- Bronowski, Daniel Boorstin,
Carl Sagan, et al. -- have
certainly been faithful to that
directive,” Teresi writes.
But that is hardly the only reason.
“Of the thousands of texts in
which the Maya recorded their
findings,” he also notes, “only
four survived the Spanish book
burnings.” A sad subtext of the
entire book is just how precious,
and perishable, even fundamen-
tal knowledge can be.