Byzantine Belittling

Western civilization considers itself as the epitome of human endeavor. For the last 500 years or so the West has certainly dominated and led the world in power, science, and technology. We in the West consider civilization to have begun with ancient Greeks and that we (Europe and the US) are its inheritors. This attitude has often led to an arrogant posture that exhibits pride, swagger, and pretentiousness. Worse yet, it has often taken on racist tones toward less developed nations populated by people of color. Since the West is predominantly Christian, it's also been guilty of sectarian attitudes that have spawned violence.

The West has been disdainful of the contributions of other societies and peoples—such as the Mideast, Far East, Africa, the Americas, and most indigenous cultures; pretty much any civilization other than its own. Let me describe one such example culture and the West's bias against it: the Byzantine Empire.

In the West we often disparage the term Byzantine, in the sense of something being “excessively complicated,” or even “characterized by deviousness or underhanded procedure.” (Quotes from my dictionary.) That's not at all a flattering image—not anything close to the West's admiring description of Greece. In particular, the West seems to feel that it invented and perfected science, while the rest of the world was held back by ignorance and backwardness.

The Byzantine Empire arose from the Eastern Orthodox empire founded by Constantine, after he converted to Christianity in the fourth century. He then renamed the city called Byzantium after himself: Constantinople. He didn't do a shabby job of empire establishment, because the Byzantine Empire flourished for over 1,000 years—long after the eastern Roman Empire collapsed; while Europe was wallowing in barbarism and darkness.

The Byzantine Empire absorbed the culture of the Greek and Roman Empires. Constantine admired the Greeks so much that he even switched his realm's lingua franca from Latin to Greek. The arts and sciences also flourished, as the Byzantines absorbed and expanded upon Greek and Roman knowledge.

To repeat, the Byzantine Empire lasted a millennium. That's no mean feat. It was able to fend off the Muslims for all of that time—finally yielding to the Ottoman Empire in the 16^th century. In fact the Byzantines and the Islamic world together nurtured Greek and Roman art, literature, and science, until Europe finally entered the scene, during the Enlightenment. The West owes a large debt to both the Islamic and Byzantine maintenance and furtherance of knowledge—a debt it rarely acknowledges. Had these previous eastern empires not protected and expanded scholarship, the West would have had to start all over, rather than stand on the shoulders of those former empires.

Here are a few examples of what knowledge the Byzantine Empire possessed, long before the West climbed out of barbarity. They knew, for example, that the Earth was round and had with sophistication proved it. Yet it took the West a few more centuries to get past its flat-Earth mentality.

The Byzantines rid themselves of the cumbersome Roman numbering system, having adopted what is referred to as the Arabic numbering system. Interestingly, that system really originated in India, not Islam. India, of course, is another even farther east country whose culture was also disparaged by Europeans.

For nearly two millennia Aristotle's erroneous physical ideas had dominated all belief systems. Europe didn't begin to cast off Aristotle's invalid notions until the 17^th century—led by Galileo. But wait—Byzantine scholars knew that many of Aristotle's pronouncements about the physical world were wrong, centuries earlier. For example, Galileo demonstrated that Aristotle's ideas about falling bodies were wrong, by dropping some weights from Pisa's inclined tower—a realization that Byzantium had reached far sooner. Why did the Europeans ignore what the Byzantines had known for so long?

The accomplishments of the Byzantine Empire are just one example of existing knowledge that non-western cultures possessed, well before the Europeans emerged from the Dark Ages. The West owes a debt to these other cultures—a debt they rarely honor.