lay to the east of the Greek coast towns, but remained on friendly terms with them until the fall of
Nineveh ( 612 B.C.). This left Lydia free to turn its attention to the West, but Miletus usually
succeeded in preserving friendly relations, especially with Croesus, the last Lydian king, who was
conquered by Cyrus in 546 B.C. There were also important relations with Egypt, where the king
depended upon Greek mercenaries, and had opened certain cities to Greek trade. The first Greek
settlement in Egypt was a fort occupied by a Milesian garrison; but the most important, during the
period 610-560 B.C., was Daphnae. Here Jeremiah and many other Jewish refugees took refuge
from Nebuchadrezzar ( Jeremiah 43:5 ff); but while Egypt undoubtedly influenced the Greeks, the
Jews did not, nor can we suppose that Jeremiah felt anything but horror towards the sceptical
Ionians.
As regards the date of Thales, the best evidence, as we saw, is that he was famous for predicting
an eclipse which, according to the astronomers, must have taken place in 585 B.C. Other
evidence, such as it is, agrees in placing his activities at about this time. It is no proof of
extraordinary genius on his part to have predicted an eclipse. Miletus was allied with Lydia, and
Lydia had cultural relations with Babylonia, and Babylonian astronomers had discovered that
eclipses recur in a cycle of about nineteen years. They could predict eclipses of the moon with
pretty complete success, but as regards solar eclipses they were hampered by the fact that an
eclipse may be visible in one place and not in another. Consequently they could only know that at
such and such a date it was worth while to look out for an eclipse, and this is probably all that
Thales knew. Neither he nor they knew why there is this cycle.
Thales is said to have travelled in Egypt, and to have thence brought to the Greeks the science of
geometry. What the Egyptians knew of geometry was mainly rules of thumb, and there is no
reason to believe that Thales arrived at deductive proofs, such as later Greeks discovered. He
seems to have discovered how to calculate the distance of a ship at sea from observations taken at
two points on land, and how to estimate the height of a pyramid from the length of its shadow.
Many other geometrical theorems are attributed to him, but probably wrongly.
He was one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, each of whom was