Ionian Enlightenment

The Ionian Intellectual Revolution was a set of advances in scientific thought, explanations on nature, and discovering the natural and rational causes behind observable phenomena, that took place in archaic Greece beginning in the 6th century BC. This movement began on the Ionian coast of western Anatolia by small numbers of forward-thinking Greeks (see Ionian School and Milesian School) from cities such as Miletus, Samos, and Halicarnassus. They saw the world as something ordered and intelligible, its history following an explicable course and its different parts arranged in a comprehensible system. Most historians agree that Thales, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, started this movement by predicting a solar eclipse that actually occurred, though some believe this feat to be false.

The Greek city of Miletus was the birthplace of Greek philosophy and Western scientific thought. Their culture combined the best of a resurgent Greek civilization with borrowings from Egypt and the Middle East. Internally, the politics of the Milesians were of faction, strife, and bloody revolution; externally, they were neighbored by two powerful empires in the Lydians and Persians. Despite these unfavorable circumstances, the Milesians were commercially indefatigable. With its three harbors and progeny of daughter colonies, Miletus was the “Jewel of Ionia.” They traded not only with the Eastern empires, but also with Egypt; they sent out numerous colonies to settle in Thrace and along the coast of the Black Sea; and they had connections with Sybaris in southern Italy. Miletus bred Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes; the first three philosophers. Miletus was an essential location for this intellectual revolution to flourish due to the fact that they had connections with the great civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia which in turn allowed for a vast array of exchange of goods and ideas from across the Mediterranean and three continents.

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