Intellectual/scientific/scholarly cultures

[Jabrosky]

My story's world features a civilization called Wagudi which is more or less its intellectual and scientific powerhouse. It doesn't necessarily have the most advanced practical technology or big stone architecture (its major buildings are mostly mudbrick), but it is renown for its universities and its culture places a high emphasis on education, philosophy, and scientific inquiry. Wagudi owes its main cultural inspiration to West African civilizations like the Mali Empire, but you could say its attitude towards science more closely matches classical Athens or maybe the medieval Middle East.

What factors would encourage the evolution of scientifically advanced or scholarly cultures which emphasize education or discovery? My reasoning for Wagudi is that it has commercial ties with many different surrounding cultures, thus exposing its people to many different ideas and enriching their culture. It seems to me that a lot of the more scientific cultures in the real world, especially Athens, tended to have more commercial economies or cosmopolitan cultures.

 

[Chilari]

Leisure time. That's what enabled a growing middle class inthe Rennaissance to educate themselves. Give a whole class of society leisure time, sufficient resources that others can manage their assets and they have the time available to learn, observe, listen and debate. Which will mean a society which is well above subsistence level, so either incredibly fertile land or a lot of trade, or both. You also need a sufficient population to support an elite class; elites can only take up so much of a population.

I also think you need a culture that prizes exploration, observation, debate and open thinking. So keep away from tyranny, anti-intellectualism or ancient texts that are believed to hold all the answers.

In the Middle Ages, for example, because the ancient Greek and Romans like Aristotle and Pliny the Elder were so heavily relied upon as sources for how the world worked, like the humours and the elements, very few of the educated class actually went out and looked at, say, bees and plants and illnesses to see if Aristotle and others were in fact right, it was just assumed they were right because how could you doubt something people have been working from for 1500 years? So while beekeepers knew it was a queen who ruled the hive, the scholars who read but didn't do believed it was a king, because Aristotle said so. This wasn't corrected in academia until the 18th century, but beekeepers themselves had known it since long before Aristotle (his earlier contemporary Xenophon knew what was what, but Aristotle was a social commenter as well as a naturalist and could not accept a female in charge of so ordered a society as a hive) and never stopped knowing it because they're beekeepers, they work with them and can see what's what.

Tl;dr: Medieval intellectuals believed a hive was ruled by a king because Aristotle said so; beekeepers knew better. This was facilitated by intellectuals relying more on famous scholars of the past than on their own eyes, ears and brains.

 

[wordwalker]

Agreed, wealth and leisure are key.

Geography and history also, and you seem to have an eye for that. What kind of crossroads of different peoples is it, that different ideas start to mix and synergize there? Is it the remnant of an old but faded kingdom, too weak to dominate others but senior enough to have built up knowledge and want to play on that? Maybe it's seeing a lot of trade but doesn't have serious natural resources itself (the mudbricks).

If it isn't much into applied science, is it driven partly by religious debate, medicine (always in demand), or abstract magic?

 

[Amanita]

Having a religion that encourages the search for knowledge is a good idea as well.
In medieval times, many Muslims interpreted their scripture in such a way and therefore, philosophy and early science played an important role. Later, these interpretations have changed and some Muslim extremists consider all education evil. I don't know which interpretation is closer to the truth but a similar situation could make for interesting conflict.
You could also have a religion that unambigiously encourages education and science of course.

Another important aspect is a need for something which demands advanced knowledge, such as irrigation systems. Ancient Egypt itself gives plenty of examples for that but you probably know this as this seems to be one of your favourite subjects.

 

[Saigonnus]

The principal thing to the advancement of any culture at the fundamental level is having an excess of resources. It frees up part of the population for crafts/the arts etc instead of having to go out and hunt/farm for what you need to survive. "Humans" have been on the planet for 4 million years or more, but it's only the last 15,000 years or so that we've made any significant advancement. Once mankind got to building villages and farming/raising livestock instead of being hunter/gatherers the excess food allowed for a greater population and some of those could be specialists.

 

[ThinkerX]

Be a bit contrary here and say

1) Necessity is the Mother of Invention. New technologies come into play because for some reason - lack of resources, social upheaval, economics - the old tried and true ways do not work. The Enlightenment, for example, took place during a period of major religious and political turmoil - formation of Protestantism, and such joys as the 30 Years War, which killed a dang big chunk of Europes populace.

2) Cross cultural contact. When Alexander the Great took his stab at conquoring the world, he brought Greek logic into direct contact with Egyptian and Mesopotamian (including Jewish) stores of knowledge which had been horded by stratified priest castes for millenia. These ideas were compared and combined, creating somewhat new. Likewise, discoveries brought back from abroad helped fuel the Enlightenment of the 16th-17th centuries.

Absent something like this, new ideas tend to become...well, 'academic toys'. The ancient romans had the potential to go industrial - but their society was based on slave labor, and technology was seen as a direct threat to the ruling classes power. The old line greek philosophers deduced many interesting mathematical propositions, but were vehmently opposed to the practical use of such.

So...I'd argue your society at some point in the past was confronted with a problem so severe, so 'out of bounds' they resorted to 'oddball knowledge' to fix it, and afterwards decided this oddball knowledge might have other applications. I'd also argue for contact with other cultures....and for the collapse of the old priest caste in this knowledge loving culture.

The argument has been made many times that the church preserved knowledge throughout the Dark Ages, faithfully coping ancient scrolls. However, it is also true this was all 'priviliged information' - very few people outside the church were even literate, and when more people did start becoming literate, the Church took a hard stance against. An educated populace is a direct threat to a religious group/caste.