> Past glory is small consolation, or none at all.

I think its far worse. Current and in power ideology has co-opted scientific progress for romanticizing about a past, often fictional. That's why we have government patronage of fraudulent medicine-men and their medicine such as coronil that was supposed to ward off coronavirus and simultaneously fight the evil conspiracies of the western civilization that denied them their due glory.

I also misunderstood an aspect of your original comment. I thought you were waxing romantically eloquent -- look they had no pencil and paper and they would just gaze poetically at the heavens and maths would happen in their brains... just imagine what would have happened had they been given paper.

Hence my comment, that lack of writing material was not holding them back.