One big realization I had how sophisticated the ancient world is, the Antithikara Mechanism. Device built by ancient greeks in 200BC using thousands of years of astronomical learning to build the first KNOWN Analog Computer and devices of similar sophistication are not seen until the late middle ages / early renaissance.
Some ancient societies were quite skilled and sophisticated in certain areas. But as far as we can determine they didn't have the scientific method as we understand it today.
Nobody claimed there was no science. Just that there was no scientific method, nor the supremacy of scientific over religious explanations for the natural world.
The scientific method didn’t exist before the Enlightenment. We had tolerant societies before the present. But the notion that science should trump religion is modern.
That doesn’t imply a glorious present. Just a qualitatively different one from any period before the modern era.
I'd rather say that the distinction between disciplines of learning is an anachronism before the early modern era (and even through much of it). "Philosophy" included what we now call medicine, natural science, theology, astronomy, astrology, and even music theory. There wasn't a question of "trumping" in the sense that they weren't thought of as different things.
This is primarily a terminological issue, what is used as a general term: "Philosophy", "natural philosophy", "Science and scholarship" (the German "Wissenschaft" always means both together -- "science" in particular is "Naturwissenschaft").
A discipline emerges, when a specific body of systematic knowledge becomes so specific that it typically requires specific expert knowledge and training (polymaths aside). In the European history of ideas, the first such body of knowledge was mathematics, but many others evolved already in Antiquity and were refined during the Middle Ages, such as astronomy, medicine, botanics, ... By the way: music theory in this times was the study of harmonic intervals and predominantly mathematics.
And the conflict between religion and science avant la lettre was as old as all of this (see Sokrates or Abelard to mention just the two most famous from Antiquity and the Middle Ages, respectively).
What changed gradually in the 17th and then had a break through in the 18th century was the adoption of the experimental method. This was not completely new, but from then on become the standard that makrs modern science.
> But the notion that science should trump religion is modern.
Not particularly: in both the Medieval and Islamic worlds, the writings of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) introduced this concept. And, then as now, it depended on an irrationalism about religion (or a view that religion was a sort of noble lie for controlling the masses) that was widely rejected by the medievals who tended to prefer a harmony model of natural reason and revelation.
> in both the Medieval and Islamic worlds, the writings of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) introduced this concept
That isn't "the scientific method replac[ing] religion as the explanation for physical phenomena," it isn't a society being organised around the principle of scientific supremacy, it's a single leading thinker being ahead of their time. The Almoravids were a conservative Islamic society.
