Influence of Greek culture from Egypt

THE BILATERAL INFLUENCE BETWEEN THE GREEKS AND THE EGYPTIANS Your Name Subject and Section Professor’s Name University Date INTRODUCTION The relations between the ancient cultures significantly impact the development of society's cultural and intellectual progress. The opposition and merging of the Greek and Egyptian cultures represent the cross-cultural relations that have shaped society's formation and the definition of culture for centuries. Synergistically, both societies' thought processes and trends influenced and progressed one another in the domains of both ideas and arts, thus creating a seminal legacy that continues to be part of modern civilization's tapestry. However, literature demonstrated that the Egyptians influenced the Greeks more than the Greeks influenced them. In this regard, the interaction process between the ancient Greeks and Egyptians is seen not as an isolated historical event but as the foundation of cultural development. BILATERAL INFLUENCE OF GREEKS AND EGYPTIANS IMPACT ON SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS The introduction of Greek philosophical thought into Egypt, primarily through two great traditions of pivotal thinkers such as Pythagoras and Plato, is a significant milestone in the history of ideas. Pythagoras, famously known for the Pythagorean theorem, was strongly influenced by Egyptian mathematics, encompassing geometrical ideas and unusual numerical systems beyond the conventional Egyptian mathematics of the prehistoric period (Huffman and Zalta, 2005). Likewise, Plato structured his Philosophical systems significantly based on his interactions with Egyptian occultism and education and incorporated these ideas into his own philosophy, which, at the same time, gave the foundation of Western philosophy (Griffiths, 1965). Moreover, the scholarly work of Nicholas Chukwudike Anakwue further explores the depth and implications of these interactions in his article " The African Origins of Greek Philosophy: Ancient Egypt in Retrospect" in a bid to give a historical background to the philosophical discourse, Anakwue (2017) takes the reader through the historical discussions concerning the question of preeminence of Greek philosophy and concludes that the discipline was borrowed and shaped from ancient Egyptian philosophical knowledge. His arguments require that the role of African people in philosophy has been intentionally minimized and that there is an ethnocentric approach to history, whereby the progress of civilizations in Europe is portrayed as the advancement of human thought in general, ignoring all the other civilizations. Comparin...