Quote:
Originally Posted by glebo
ya know, they were sort of ahead when they invented math/algebra and writing...why didn't they continue.
*caveat, that may not be entirely true, but I know a coupla millenia ago, they (Arabs, they weren't muslims yet...oh, wait..answered my own question.) did come up with some good stuff
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Actually, IIRC, the Arabs got almost everything from India. They get credit because Western Europe was having "difficulties" and not widely travelled (lacking a mechanism for exchange of information) until the Crusades. The sole exception was Southern (Moorish) Spain and the big reason it was enlightened is because the Catholic Church couldn't destroy the ancient Greek texts the Moorish scholars treasured.
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A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero (42B.C)
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