Astronomica

In every discipline, it was the Greeks who achieved the most, for they invested great study in this: to illuminate, correct, and refine the inventions of their ancestors. Who could deny that the arts, which the Greeks improved daily, should be credited to no nation other than those very Greeks, who unearthed them step by step and, as it were, from the depths? The author uses the phrase "ex alto," literally "from the deep" or "from on high," to suggest the profound effort required to recover ancient knowledge.

For as for the Chaldeans and Egyptians—from whom some claim the Greeks learned everything—what, I ask, do they possess today that they did not receive from the Greeks? Indeed, what books of the liberal arts do they have that are somewhat older, which they have not translated word-for-word from the Greek into their own language? Of these people, the former Referring to the Chaldeans. retain nothing ancient except for their characters, which are nothing other than the altered letters of the Phoenicians and Canaanites. The Egyptians, truly, do not even possess their own letters, but have borrowed them from the Arabs.

But, it is said, the Greeks learned their letters late from Cadmus In Greek mythology, Cadmus was the Phoenician prince credited with introducing the alphabet to the Greeks., without which no memory of the disciplines can be preserved. This, indeed, no one can deny. And yet, we do not therefore concede that the Greeks necessarily had to receive their arts from the same people from whom they learned their letters; for letters are older than any formal discipline. Neither a Phoenician, a Chaldean, nor an Egyptian taught them medicine or philosophy. Of these, the former Medicine. was not far from its perfection in the time of Hippocrates, a most ancient writer; as for the latter Philosophy., the many sects of philosophers—so differing among themselves—prove that it could not have been [received] from any Chaldean or Egyptian...