A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



tion of the scientific attainments of the Babylonians 

 and Assyrians can scarcely arouse us to a like enthu- 

 siasm. In considering the subject we have seen that, 

 so far as pure science is concerned, the efforts of the 

 Babylonians and Assyrians chiefly centred about the 

 subjects of astrology and magic. With the records 

 of their ghost-haunted science fresh in mind, one might 

 be forgiven for a momentary desire to take issue with 

 Canon Rawlinson's words. We are assured that the 

 scientific attainments of Europe are almost solely to be 

 credited to Babylonia and not to Egypt, but we should 

 not forget that Plato, the greatest of the Greek think- 

 ers, went to Egypt and not to Babylonia to pursue his 

 studies when he wished to penetrate the secrets of 

 Oriental science and philosophy. Clearly, then, clas- 

 sical Greece did not consider Babylonia as having a 

 monopoly of scientific knowledge, and we of to-day, 

 when we attempt to weigh the new evidence that has 

 come to us in recent generations with the Babylonian 

 records themselves, find that some, at least, of the 

 heritages for which Babylonia has been praised are of 

 more than doubtful value. Babylonia, for example, 

 gave us our seven-day week and our system of com- 

 puting by twelves. But surely the world could have 

 got on as well without that magic number seven ; and 

 after some hundreds of generations we are coming to 

 feel that the decimal system of the Egyptians has ad- 

 vantages over the duodecimal system of the Baby- 

 lonians. Again, the Babylonians did not invent the 

 alphabet ; they did not even accept it when all the rest 

 of the world had recognized its value. In grammar 

 and arithmetic, as with astronomy, they seemed not to 



