c ha p t e r 1

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In the Beginning

Science is special. It’s the best way we have of finding out about the
world and everything in it – and that includes us.
People have been asking questions about what they have seen
around them for thousands of years. The answers they have come
up with have changed a lot. So has science itself. Science is dynamic,
building upon the ideas and discoveries which one generation
passes on to the next, as well as making huge leaps forward when
completely new discoveries are made. What hasn’t changed is the
curiosity, imagination and intelligence of those doing science. We
might know more today, but people who thought deeply about
their world 3,000 years ago were just as smart as we are.
This book isn’t only about microscopes and test tubes in
laboratories, although that is what most people think of when they
Copyright 2012. Yale University Press.

think of science. For most of human history, science has been

used alongside magic, religion and technology to try to understand
and control the world. Science might be something as simple

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 2 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f s c i e n c e

as observing the sun rise each morning, or as complicated as iden-

tifying a new chemical element. Magic could be looking at the stars
to foretell the future, or maybe what we would call a superstition,
like keeping out of the path of a black cat. Religion might lead you
to sacrifice an animal to appease the gods, or to pray for world
peace. Technology might involve knowing how to light a fire or
build a new computer.
Science, magic, religion and technology were used by the earliest
human societies that settled in river valleys across India, China
and the Middle East. The river valleys were fertile, which allowed
crops to be planted each year, enough to feed a large community.
This allowed some people in these communities enough time to
focus on one thing, to practise and practise, and become expert at
it. The first ‘scientists’ (though they wouldn’t have been called that
at the time) were probably priests.
In the beginning, technology (which is about ‘doing’) was more
important than science (which is about ‘knowing’). You need to
know what to do, and how to do it, before you can successfully grow
your crops, make your clothes, or cook your food. You don’t need
to know why some berries are poisonous, or some plants edible, to
learn how to avoid the one and grow the other. You don’t have to
have a reason why the sun rises each morning and sets each evening,
for these things to happen, each and every day. But human beings
are not only able to learn things about the world around them, they
are also curious, and that curiosity lies at the heart of science.
We know more about the people of Babylon (in present-day
Iraq) than we do about other ancient civilisations, for a simple
reason: they wrote on clay tablets. Thousands of these tablets,
written almost 6,000 years ago, have survived. They tell us how the
Babylonians viewed their world. They were extremely organised,
keeping careful records of their harvests, stores, and state finances.
The priests spent much of their time looking after the facts and
figures of ancient life. They were also the main ‘scientists’, surveying
land, measuring distances, viewing the sky, and developing tech-
niques for counting. We still use some of their discoveries today.
Like us, they used tally marks to keep count; this is when you make

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 in the beginning 3

four vertical marks and cross through these diagonally with a fifth,
which you might have seen in cartoons of a prison cell, made by the
prisoners keeping count of how many years they have been locked
up. Far more importantly, it was the Babylonians who said there
should be sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour,
as well as 360 degrees in a circle and seven days in the week. It
is funny to think that there is no real reason why sixty seconds
make a minute, and seven days make a week. Other numbers would
have worked just as well. But the Babylonian system got picked up
elsewhere and it has stuck.
The Babylonians were good at astronomy – that is, examining
the heavens. Over many years they began to recognise patterns in
the positions of stars and planets in the sky at night. They believed
that the earth was at the centre of things, and that there were
powerful – magical – connections between us and the stars. As long
as people believed that the earth was the centre of the universe,
they didn’t count it as a planet. They divided the night sky into
twelve parts, and gave each part a name associated with certain
groups (or ‘constellations’) of stars. Through a heavenly game of
Join-the-dots, the Babylonians saw pictures of objects and animals
in some constellations, such as a set of scales and a scorpion. This
was the first Zodiac, the basis of astrology, which is the study of the
influence of the stars upon us. Astrology and astronomy were
closely linked in ancient Babylon and for many centuries after-
wards. Many people today know which sign of the Zodiac they
were born under (I am a Taurus, the bull) and read their horo-
scopes in newspapers and magazines for advice about their lives.
But astrology is not part of modern science.
The Babylonians were only one of several powerful groups in
the ancient Middle East. We know most about the Egyptians, who
settled along the River Nile as early as 3,500 bc. No civilisation
before or since was so dependent on a single natural feature. The
Egyptians relied on the Nile for their very existence, for every
year as the mighty river flooded it brought rich silt to replenish the
land around its banks, and so prepare it for the next year’s crops.
Egypt is very hot and dry, so a lot of things have survived for us to

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admire and learn from today, including many pictures, and a kind
of pictorial writing, called hieroglyphics. After Egypt was conquered
first by the Greeks and then by the Romans, the ability to read
and write hieroglyphs disappeared, and so for almost 2,000 years
the meaning of their writing was lost. Then, in 1798, a French
soldier found a round tablet in a pile of old rubble in a little town
near Rosetta, in the north of Egypt. It had a proclamation written
in three languages: hieroglyphics, Greek, and an even older form
of Egyptian writing called demotics. The Rosetta Stone came to
London, where you can see it today in the British Museum. What
a breakthrough! Scholars could read the Greek and therefore trans-
late the hieroglyphs, decoding the mysterious Egyptian writing.
Now we could really begin to learn about the ancient Egyptians’
beliefs and practices.
Egyptian astronomy was similar to the Babylonians’, but Egyptian
concern with the afterlife meant that they were more practical in
their stargazing. The calendar was very important, not only to tell
them when it was the best time to plant, or when to expect the Nile
to flood, but also to plan religious festivals. Their ‘natural’ year was
360 days – that is, twelve months made up of three weeks lasting
ten days each – and they added an extra five days at the end of the
year to keep the seasons from slipping. The Egyptians thought that
the universe was shaped like a rectangular box, with their world at
the base of the box, and the Nile flowing exactly through the centre
of that world. The beginning of their year coincided with the
flooding of the Nile, and they eventually linked it with the nightly
rising of the brightest star in the night sky, which we call Sirius.
As in Babylon, the priests were important in the courts of the
Pharaohs, the Egyptian rulers. The Pharaohs were considered to be
divine, and able to enjoy a life after death. This is one reason why they
constructed the pyramids, which are really gigantic funeral monu-
ments. Pharaohs, their relatives and other important people, along
with servants, dogs, cats, furniture and food supplies, were placed
in these massive structures to await new life in the next world.
To preserve the bodies of important people (after all, it wouldn’t do
to turn up in the afterlife rotten and stinking) the Egyptians

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 in the beginning 5

developed ways of embalming the dead. This meant first of all

removing the internal organs (they had a long hook for scooping out
the brain through the nostrils) and placing them in special jars.
Chemicals were used to preserve the rest of the body, which was then
wrapped in linen and put in its final resting place in its tomb.
Embalmers would have had a pretty good idea of what the heart,
lungs, liver and kidneys looked like. Unfortunately, they did not
describe the organs that they removed, so we don’t know what
they thought the organs did. However, other medical papyri have
survived, and these do tell us about Egyptian medicine and surgery.
As was common at the time, the Egyptians believed a mix of reli-
gious, magical and natural things caused diseases. Healers would
have recited spells while giving their remedies to patients. But
many of the cures invented by the Egyptians do seem to have come
from careful observation of illnesses. Some of the medicines they
put on dressings for wounds after injury or surgery might well have
kept the wound free from germs and so aided healing. This was
thousands of years before we even knew what germs were.
At this stage of history, counting, astronomy and medicine were
the three most obvious ‘scientific’ fields of activity. Counting,
because you need to know ‘how many’ before you can plant enough
crops and trade with other people, or to see if you have enough
soldiers or pyramid builders at your disposal. Astronomy, because
the sun, moon and stars are so closely related to the days, months
and seasons, that carefully noting their positions is fundamental for
calendars. Medicine, because when people fall sick or are injured,
they naturally seek help. But in each of these cases, magic, religion,
technology and science were mixed, and for these ancient Middle
Eastern civilisations, we have to guess a lot about why people did
what they did, or how ordinary people went about their daily lives.
Ordinary people are always difficult to know about, since it was
mostly powerful people, who could read and write, who have left
the records of history. This was also true in two other ancient civi-
lisations that started at about the same time, but in faraway Asia:
China and India.

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