The History of Science School and the Diffusionists

Diffusionists claim that the Greeks picked up a lot of things from their more advanced neighbors as they encountered them. Otto Neuigabauer's magisterial history of ancient mathematical astronomy in three volumes has set the terms of debate for what came after. In Babylonia we have cuneiform tablets as early as 700 BCE, giving tables of observation for the rising in settings of different heavenly bodies known as ephemerides tablets. Mesopotamian ideas about astronomy might have passed to the Greek-speaking world because the Mesopotamians were now in theGreek-speaking world.