Similarly...

Similarly, in the Orphic account Kronos, the son of Sky (Ouronos), by a deceit as directed by his mother Earth (Gaia) hid himself in a place of ambush and when his father came along with Night and in desiring love spread himself over her, he sheared off his genitals. The drops of blood that fell fertilized Gaia and generated the Furies, Giants, and the Mehan Nymphs, and the blood that fell into the sea produced Aphrodite (Venus).

This element like many other contents of Greek cosmogony is of pre‑Greek origin for its variants are found in the cultures of the Hittites and the Hindus as well. From Kronos all other gods sprang. Zeus (Jupiter), the god of thunder and lightning, was one of his sons from his sister and consort Rhea. Apollo the sun‑god, who with his horses and chariot sailed in the golden bowl round the streams of Okeanos, was the son of Zeus from Leto.

Apollo's sister Artemis, the hunting goddess, was the mistress of all wild things. This rough account of the earliest Greek speculation from the dawn of Greek civilization, about 1200 B.C. down to the seventh century B.C., clearly indicates that it concerned itself with (i) the nature of things in the universe, (ii) the nature of gods, and (iii) the origin of the world and the gods. There­fore it can be described to be cosmological, theological, and cosmogonical. Its language was poetry.

Greek Philosophy in the Mainland and the Islands of Asia Minor Ionic Philosophy It goes to the credit of the philosophers of Miletus, the metropolis of Ionia, a Greek colony in Asia Minor ruled by Persia, to have divested Greek thought of theogony and cosmogony and made the phenomena of nature and their origin their chief concern. Their thought was, however, more physical and cosmological than metaphysical. Each of them attempted to discover a single basic material from which everything sprang.

Thales The first of this group of thinkers was Thales (b.c. 640 B.C.) of Miletus, in Ionia which was a commercially developed Greek colony in Asia Minor and had close contacts with the relatively advanced peoples of Egypt and Babylonia. He was a man of great practical wisdom and was one of the seven sages of antiquity.

He is said to have visited Egypt and brought geo­metry from there; foretold solstices and an eclipse, presumably by studying the Babylonian records; measured the height of a pyramid by its shadow; turned the course of a river; and discovered the constellation Little Bear.