Before the Greeks and the Jews

>>2730860
Egyptian ruled over the areas where Jews will later rule dwell, so of course they had some inlfuence over them, this is way Egyptians are foten mentioned in Jewish religious texts, same goes for the Greeks, who were in contact with the Egyptians since the Bronze age, and again, Egypt is often mentioned in the earliest Greek myths/poems

>>2730860
It's the greeks who owe to the older civilizations, without phoenician/hittites there is no greek alphabet. And without egyptians sinaitic/babylonian cuneiform, no phoenician/hittites. Etc etc.

>>2730864
No no no, I'm asking about more than just being "mentioned". Can things like Aristotlean logic or the Jewish deconstruction of pagan sacrificial thinking be traced back to anything earlier, or did they just appear out of nowhere?

>>2730870
>hittites
>Greek alphabet

Hittites used hieroglyhs and cuneiform, they never had an alphabet

>>2730870
Who gives a shit about which alphabet they used?

>>2730872
>Arisotelan logic

No, it's a product of Greek thought

>Jewish deconstruction of pagan sacrificial thinking

What do you mean?

But some passages in the Bible were clearly inspired by Egyptian texts, and a Babylonian influence is also seen in Biblical myths

>>2730880
For example Judaism prefigures Christianity in that it includes stories of persecution.

Now pagan mythologies almost always have similar stories, except told from the perspective of the persecutors, while the victim is always considered to be evil and deserving of punishment. These stories serve to strengthen the community and are ritualised in the form of sacrifice. But many Jewish stories instead take the point of view of the victim, while it is the persecutors who are evil. It's a slow process that goes in the direction of Christianity, which completely deconstructs pagan religion by proclaiming the complete and perfect innocence of Christ as he is lynched by the community.

Although some Greek playwrights also show a certain intuition of the falsehood of mythological thinking in the way they portray ancient Greek myth.

>>2730860
>But what do they in turn owe to previous civilisations, like Egypt or Sumer?

Bronze, iron, and agriculture which is a precursor to any settled society. Can't forget about animal domestication and husbandry.

>>2730872
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_mathematics#Influence

>>2730860
I've read bits of Shape of Ancient Thoughts by McEvily.

The book presents a pretty reasonable argument about the large influence of Indian on pre-socratic thoughts. This is where you see stuff like reincarnation, large monistic ideas like solution to one vs others, the idea of cosmic cycles, etc through Upanishads. This was before Alexander period. During the Alexander period, there were another large cross transference of ideas, in both India/Greece direction. Where Greeks had refined good chunk of formal methods, the Indians had Buddhists ideas which had matured and went into Greek philosophy section. A large greek colonists even adopted Buddhism as their religion during that period too. With them maintaining connection between Greek empire and the Indian empire, the ideas flowed even more.

As for others, there's Persian/Mesopotamian culture that influenced the Greeks and the Jews.