Thales of Miletus 624–546 BCEOn a hot Ionian afternoon sometime in the sixth century BCE, an aging man stands on the harbor wall of Miletus watching the sea. Ships creak at their moorings, merchants shout in several languages, and the air smells of tar, wool, and salt. For most people here, the sea is simply a way to earn a living. For him, it is something more: a clue. The waves, the changing tides, the clouds building offshore, the strange regularity beneath the chaos of wind and water – all of it suggests to him that the world is not ruled by the moods of gods, but by something steady, intelligible, and shared. His name is Thales of Miletus, and later ages will call him the first philosopher.To speak of Thales is to step into a world where myth and reason still share the same crowded streets. The Greeks have epic poetry, sacred stories, and rituals to explain the world: Zeus throws lightning, Poseidon shakes the earth, Apollo steers the sun. To question this is not only unusual, it is almost unheard of. Yet in the commercial, cosmopolitan port of Miletus, where ideas and goods arrive from Egypt, Phoenicia, Lydia, and beyond, it becomes possible for someone to ask an unsettling question: what if the world can be explained without resorting to myth at all?We know very little about Thales as a person, and almost nothing in his own words survives. What we have are fragments of stories, comments from later thinkers, and anecdotes that hover somewhere between history and legend. But reading between those scattered lines, a portrait emerges of an Ionian citizen who wandered widely, learned from other cultures, and began to look at nature with an eye that was neither priestly nor purely practical. He was not trying to placate divine powers. He was trying to understand how things work.

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