He’s the guy who purportedly wrote the history and original laws that defined the Israelites/Jews, the most cohesive ethnic group that has maintained their identity for three millenia.
And that resulted in modern judaism, christianity and islam affecting the vast majority of the world.
Had Moses or whoever ,singular or plural, attempted to script what it meant to be an Israelite never drew the pen or hammered the chisel,our modern world would appear drammatically different. Just how would be open for debate.
I disagree. Very few of them have escaped the influence of the Catholic religion and/or the subsequent “Christian” ones. I never said they didn’t have their own religions, or that those weren’t important, but “Most Influential” is the discussion here. At one point or another, ans in very large ways, they have all been forced to respond to the impetus of the religion founded by St. Paul.
If we are accepting prehistoric unknowns, then I vote for the first proto-European who had the idea to promote a “God” or system of “Gods” and set him/her self up as its spokesman. I guess the inventor of “Priesthood” is what I’m getting at.
I own a copy of “The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History” - and it makes a pretty compelling argument for those on the list as being the most influential. Not sure if this is the same as the OP’s ‘significant’, but I think it might be.
The people on the list are chosen simply because the things they are reported to have done have influenced the largest number of people worldwide. Hence, Muhammad ranks higher than JC because there have historically been more Muslims - or people affected by Muslims. Cai Lun is ranked high because of the impact of his invention on the world. Doesn’t mean someone else would not have created paper - but he did it first. Equally important, the length of time the invention has been around and the number of users of it through the ages increase its weighted importance.
Peoples whose origins/name/info are completely unknown, such as the inventor of fire/wheel/etc, are left off the list. Seems reasonable since it would just be speculation on whether it was a group of people or whatever that caused that persons significance.
1 Muhammad
2 Isaac Newton
3 Jesus Christ
4 Gautama Buddha
5 Confucius
6 St. Paul
7 Cai Lun
8 Johannes Gutenberg
9 Christopher Columbus
10 Albert Einstein
If you’re seriously interested in the most significant/influential people, look this book up. The author makes a decent case for everyone on the list - plus a 3 or 4 page bio on a lot of these guys was pretty educational to me.
I chose the inventor of bronze because, AFAIK, it was the first metal to be purified and shaped for human use. I see it as the basis of virtually every created material since.
The wheel is the basis of virtually every machine in history. Show me a boat with a motor that doesn’t have a wheel in it.
The steam engine represents the creation of power greater than what can be developed by human or animal muscle power. One might argue that the same is true of windmills and water wheels, but a steam engine can be put almost anywhere and run 24/7 so long as it can be supplied with fuel. It is the basis of the industrial revolution.
But there wasn’t any one guy who invented “priesthood”, or the concept of “gods”. This is an idea that was multiply invented by lots of different people on different continents. The Aztec priests who cut out thousands of hearts on top of pyramids of skulls didn’t learn the idea from some proto-Sumerian scribe.
Every hunter-gatherer society has some notion of the supernatural, which in my opinion is a natural superstition caused by mistakenly attributing human emotions to nonhuman entities. We humans have a gigantic purpose-built set of mental facilities that enable us to decode and interpret the behavior of other human beings, and it seems like a pretty much inevitable mistake for those facilities to be used to interpret natural phenomenon.
And so humans invent spirits and monsters, and when floods or lightning or bad hunting happens, they believe that some entity with human-like emotions must be responsible, and since humans can be influenced in various ways, they attempt to influence these mysterious entities in the same way they’d try to mollify an annoyed neighbor. And as societies get more complex, their ideas about these entities get more complex. So tribal people imagine the spirits living a tribal lifestyle, people living in the early kingdoms imagined the spirits (that is, gods) living like the early nobility. And so a thunder spirit is imagined to be a king. And the shamans who specialized in interacting with the supernatural become priests.
Just like the invention of agriculture, religion organically grew out of the human experience. It wasn’t like “The Invention of Lying” where the prehistoric equivalent of Ricky Gervais made up the idea of God and everyone just believed him.
And as for the inventors of particular technologies, I’m more of the opinion that technology tends to be multiply invented, and if you look into the canonical inventors of particular technologies you’ll usually find that they didn’t actually invent the gadget they’re credited with, but rather built the first well known and smoothly working version of the gadget. The history of the invention of the sewing machine is a great example, because it’s development and the legal wrangling over it are so well documented. You sometimes see one person come up with something revolutionary, but much more often it’s a race between people to see who can figure something out first–Watson and Crick getting credit for discovering the structure of DNA is a great example. Smother Watson and Crick in their cribs and the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA would have been awarded to someone else within a year or two.
That’s only one meaning of the word “history,” and it’s not the relevant one. Please double-check your dictionary before offering a definitional correction.
Poor old James Maxwell. Guy goes and unifies electricity and magnetism which ultimately overthrows Newtonian physics then helps lay the foundation for statistical thermodynamics and he gets left out while the twitchy alchemist and bad hair day violinist get all the glory.
You claim their legacy starts with some influence on the unification of Greece. Tell that to Phillip and Alexander the Great. Or the Spartans who never submitted to either.
I think this is an exaggeration. Agriculture has definitely been developed multiple times by multiple societies, but as Diamond points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, there are a few clearly-defined centers of origin. Agriculture spread very rapidly from those centers, being carried by farming cultures or being adopted readily by their neighbors. The spread was so rapid that it probably precluded lots of separate opportunities for independent discovery.
I would say that if we have to answer with a name (because the true inventors of human civilizations - those responsible for fire/mining/agriculture/writing/speech/etc - have no names) than I would go with:
Socrates
Or Plato or Aristotle, but Socrates was first so, imho, that gives him the lead.
Jesus or Paul or Moses? Not even close. The thing that makes Western Civilization so different from other cultures is our rational, questioning approach to everything, this approach first given to the world by Socrates.
