The process of discovering new knowledge is tricky. But we try to give credit where it’s deserved. Or do we? A few examples of Byzantine discoveries suggest this question is more complex than meets the eye. (Recall that the Byzantine Empire was the successor of the Roman Empire in the east. We could also call them the Eastern Roman Empire. It is the setting for my recent novel Theodora. Click to check out this great book!)

One Example of Byzantine Discoveries – Physics

We know that objects, regardless of size and weight, fall at the same speed. (In a vacuum, that is.) A bowling ball falls at the same speed as a baseball. Typically, the Italian Galileo Galilei gets credit for demonstrating this fact. As the PBS website states in a typical example (click to read more), “For thousands of years, people erroneously thought that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones. It was not until Galileo studied the motion of falling objects that it became clear that, in the absence of air resistance, gravity causes all objects to fall at the same rate.”

However, consider the following from Ionnes Philoponos. He lived and taught in Alexandria circa 530, over 1,000 years before Galileo’s career. When asked if the speed of motion was proportional to the weight of a body, he had this to say. “This is a complete error, as we can see through observation better than through any abstract proof. If you drop two bodies of vastly different weights from the same height, you will see that the difference in the time that it takes for them to fall is not at all proportional to their difference in weight; it is, in fact, a small difference.”

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Another Example of Byzantine Discoveries – Food

Another example of Byzantine discoveries concerns cheese. The cheese we know as Swiss cheese, it appears, should be known as Paphlagonian cheese. Michael Psellos, writing in the 1000s, described the process. The cheese-makers would blow air into the milk as it set, creating a cheese with holes in it just like we would recognize today.

Calendars, Too

The modern calendar we use is known as the Gregorian Calendar. That’s because of a pope, Gregory XIII, who proclaimed the new calendar once convinced of the errors in the prior version, the Julian Calendar. He did so in 1582. The Julian Calendar had been off by a small fraction of a day each year. This eventually caused the seasons to fall out of line with the calendar by about ten days. (The change took hold throughout Europe. Except in Russia, where the Julian Calendar remained in effect until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. I guess the Bolsheviks got one thing right.)

However, we should call the present calendar the Gregoran Calendar. That’s because of a Byzantine astronomer, Nikephorus Gregoras, who explained the error to Emperor Andronikos II in 1324. The emperor declined to take action, however. It seems he feared changing the calendar would cause friction with the Church and confuse everyone else.

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One Technological Failure

The idea of locking one’s door is not new. Ancient people had nearly as many reasons for it as modern people do. The Byzantine Empire had locks as well. However, nearly all of them were of the same type. Apparently, they lacked the distinctive cuts and notches that allow keys to open some doors and not others. Accordingly, a few master keys probably opened nearly every lock in the empire.

Other Things

The Byzantine Empire looked rather modern in other ways, even if the inventions they employed weren’t truly new. My last post (click here) mentioned their use of chemicals in warfare. Some ate with forks, knives, and napkins. Rebellious young people sported mullets. Twerking was a popular form of entertainment at court. The empire featured sports teams in chariot racing. Guilds made sure that manufacturing was high in quality. The emperor’s throne could rise into the air, and gilded lions surrounding the throne roared at visitors.

The Byzantine government behaved in modern ways as well. It had a major public welfare system, at least in the larger cities. It also undertook major public works projects. The Byzantine capital of Constantinople was fed by more miles of aqueducts than was Rome, for instance. The cisterns in that city that stored the water were the size of modern soccer stadiums. The better neighborhoods in cities had running water, albeit in public fountains rather than private homes.

Not everyone enjoyed these advantages, of course. Those who lived in small villages typically had a low standard of living without the entertainment available in cities. They had little access to manufactured goods and were the most vulnerable in times of war.

Why Hide These Achievements?

To return to where this post started, we might ask why the Byzantines (or anyone, really) don’t receive full credit for their ideas. This happens more often that one would imagine. Mathematicians in ancient Babylon knew the Pythagorean Theorem more than ten centuries before Pythagoras did. Ancient Egyptians knew the heart was a pump, but William Harvey gets credit for discovering the circulation of blood in the body in the 1600s. Plenty more examples exist.

Some cultural appropriation may be at work. Until about one hundred years ago, the Byzantine Empire had a horrible reputation among historians. Even their most famous sports stadium, the Hippodrome, gained a derisive connotation. (In the US, “hippodroming” became a term for dishonest play in sports and throwing games to gamblers.) Eastern Europe looked backward, technologically speaking, compared to Western Europe. People had no trouble believing Western Europeans had devised most of the good things about society.

Because of the disdain for some civilizations historically, they also received less attention from historians. Less research meant less knowledge of their more specialized achievements. It also meant less attention in textbooks in schools. When I taught Western Civilization to college students, for instance, most textbooks I tried gave weak treatment to the Byzantines. They focused on Justinian’s effort at reconquest, a handful of other things, then went back to Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire, and so forth. The Byzantines were debating the nature of God (read my next post about them to learn more!) while Europeans were wearing animal skins and drinking from cattle horns, but the people drinking from cattle horns got the attention in the textbooks. (A bit of an exaggeration, I know. But you get the point.)

Do These Byzantine Discoveries Really Matter?

Maybe. It depends on if you value making sure people get the credit they deserve, I suppose. It probably doesn’t affect your life or mine directly, but why not be accurate? This accuracy has a subtle influence on how we regard people historically.

It’s possible (probable?) I’m the only one out there worrying about this. What do you think? What lengths should we go to so that we can give people the credit they’ve earned historically?

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