| Edited by Lenny, so as to add a Disclaimer | |
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| Bear in mind that I haven't studied this since my GCSE Medicine through Time course over three years ago, so I might be a bit rusty. However, I'm quite confident that a lot of this is correct. If you know better, though, don't hesitate to point out my mistakes. |
The main religion that I feel has hindered Technology is Christianity.
I'll take your example of the Egyptians and Romans, and raise it with the Greeks. The Egyptians and their pyramids (they even had basic ideas in medicine - problems in the body were caused by blocked channels. These channels led to places like the heart, and should one be blocked it could cause sickness. A usualy remedy for this was honey - a substance which, thousands of years later, was proven to have medicinal value).
The Greeks, although religious (as, of course, were the Egyptians), made great advances in both Science and Technology, including the building of amazing buildings (which, like the pyramids), are barely feasible today if we used the same methods. In the field of medicine, they produced some corking folks - ever wondered where the Hippocratic oath dates from? Yep, Hipocrates, a Greek. He built upon ideas of Aristotle and brought the theory of the Four Humours into the public domain - if you were ill, it was because a humour was out of balance. Depending on the illness (runny nose, or constant vomiting, say), a different humour was taken out of the body. They also depended on the conditions at the time - hot, cold, moist, dry.
http://www.geocities.com/nulliusinverba/humours.jpg
This was an idea that was also taken up by Cladius Galen, survived the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and became the standard of the Church (Christian Church, that is) when dealing with illness. How many times have you heard of leeches being used to suck out bad blood, or a person being cut to bleed out the bad blood?
The Romans were like the Greeks in their stunning architecture, and were also the first civilisation to truly hit upon the idea of public health - massive aqueducts bringing fresh water to their cities, underground sewers, a rudimentary form of flushing latrines. It's estimated that under the Romans, comapred to life under the Saxons or Vikings, the English people were not only more healthy, but lived longer.
And then, in around 476AD, the Western Roman Empire was destroyed by the tribes of the Goths (Ostrogoths and Visigoths), the Vandals, and the Barbarians from within (bet you can't guess what the modern equivalents are named after
) - although they had an estimated 500,000 soldiers, the Romans could not continue to build solid borders and at the same time protect the internal stability of the Empire. It became a victim of its own success and literally folded in on itself.
The reason I say it was the Western Empire that collapses, it because the Eastern half survived as the Byzantine Empire, with its capital around Constantinople. It fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks, who set up their own Ottoman Empire (a Muslim Empire), which lasted until the early 1900s, when nationalistic groups within it destroyed the European half of the Empire in the Balkan Wars, and eventually set the ball rolling for the destruction of the rest of the Ottoman Empire with the events leading up to, as well as, the First World War.
Back to the matter at hand, though, upon the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Europe sunk into a regression known as the Dark Ages. And why is it known as the Dark Ages? Because written records are sparse. Extremely sparse. What we do know, however, is that within this time, the Church of Christianity gained a stranglehold over the peoples of Europe, emerging as the single ruling influence, lasting until the late 1400s and early 1500s when scholars enjoyed their Rennaissance period. During the
Empire of the Christians (as I shall now refer to it), many great Greek and Roman works were destroyed. Indeed, the only surviving copies of Hippocrates' works, for example, were to be found in the Byzantine Empire, in the hands of the Muslim scholars... who were then attacked by the Righteous Crusaders, who looted everything, and returned to Europe with chests full of the works of the old Philosophers and Physicians... which the Church locked up for safe keeping. Oh glee.
Long post, so I'll finish with:
The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans were the forerunners of technology... even before they stopped counting backwards (to which I suppose we can thank the Almighty Christ). However, upon the destruction of the last great Empire of these peoples, works were lost, ideas forgotten, and the Empire of the Christians rose up, force-feeding the peoples of Europe their own ideas about medicine and technology (Galens interpretation of the Four Humours, for example, and his writings on the anatomy of the human body - dissection of human bodies was illegal in Greek and Roman times, so Galen made do with Chimps. One of his ideas was that the human heart was made of two halves separated by a permeable muscle through which blood passed. Another was that, in line with our chimp friends, the human jawbone was comprised of two bones, rather than one). It wasn't until the scholars of the Rennaissance came along that many of these ideas, which had been preached for over 1000 years, were proven wrong.
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