Chinese Knowledge Inspired Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo? Yes, says, Menzies.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by belovelife

wasn't in leonardos time a huge return of phylosophy books like socrates an plato and stuff that were burned throughout europe in the crusades
and in the mid 1400's people from china brought them back since they had copies from the great library of alexandria

I think you’re referring to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

This happened about 1000 years before Leonardo’s time and the Renaissance in general (about 1450-1750 AD). Much of and some of the most important activity of the Renaissance involved the spread of Latin as a “universal scholarly language”, the discovery of documents in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and other classical languages, and often, their translation into Latin. This was a period of voracious acquisition of knowledge, some of it about China, but to the best of my knowledge, classical documents found in China didn’t play a significant part in it.

Works such as those by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, were so popular in their time (about 400-300 BC) that they were widely copied and distributed, making them fairly “library burning-proof”. To this day, hardest hit when museums and libraries are destroyed are not ancient and modern “bestsellers”, but obscure stuff consisting of a single or a few copies. One can argue that very obscure works are made only a little more obscure by their destruction, but still the loss of such works means the possible loss of some obscure but vital connecting, collaborating, or contradicting data with the potential to greatly expand and improve our understanding of history.

Burning libraries is bad.

[belovelife]

i read about it in a book called leonardo davinci

alexandria got burned twice
but the books were sought after and burned in the dark ages and the years preceeding them
i believe coating staues with gold and electricity was done before the library burnt down
but i'm not sure
there were random refrences to these ideas though


[
fire + books = bad
books - fire = good
]
i think there is a calculation in here somewhere

[carlton-temple]

I think the average "academic" historian lacks the practical experience of how rapidly ships and horses ect, could cover great distances and so finds it difficult to appreciate how quickly information could be passed from here to there. For example, a small sailing yacht can get from England to America in a couple of months. A Brixam fishing boat with a good wind could make 18 miles /hour. One of Napoleons generals made the round trip by post coach back and forth from Paris to Rome in a long weekend. In the museum in Groningen (Holland), there are many log-bocks from Dutch barges that rounded the Horn without compasses as they were to expensive. There are it appears possible indications that the Phoneticians visited Australia on a regular basis, the Viking boats could make Scottland in 36 hours and so on. All of which shows that through out history much more intercommunication has existed than is recorded. As a retired wooden ship builder the techniques "still" used to assemble wooden ships are lost in the mists of time, the trunel, a sort of wooden nail, easy to make may be as old as mankind. Two experienced men can build a 7metre boat in a week in split oak! To say that a "technique" or area of "knowledge" remained long isolated in any one place for long is a thus a little exaggerated. One only has to read Herodotus, to see how quickly and far he could travel. Take the Harappas peoples, sailing back and forth to Asia could of been a regular affair, certainly their distinctive pottery has turned up all over the place.

[Michaelangelica]

Maybe, but you had to stay the night at somewhere friendly from 300-1,000 AD & that was not that easy.

One of the reasons the Jewish people got into commerce and international trade as they could move from one settlement to another and have a common language and culture.

I think the Renaissance happened because of the weakening of Catholic Church power,(printing of the bible helped) the plague making labour scarce and expensive, and the Medicis' discovering money, banking, money lending (previously prohibited by the church) and international trade. Latin was a "world" language from about 200BC at least.
The Arab numerical system also helped. Try adding 10% interest to IX +IV+ XXIV=??

Certainly the rescue and translation of many Greek books by the Arabs helped too; as did their prostelysing of the Muslim Religion; which led to Arab expansion along north Africa into Spain; where Europeans again made contact with these early scientifc /mathamatical texts.

Printing & Chinese paper helped make the texts more readilly afordable and available too.
(Some century the 14th!
Barbara Trucman (sp?)has an interesting, very readable, book on it )