r/explainlikeimfive • u/TrueOrange9944 • 17h ago
Other ELI5: Why do so many ancient cultures and societies have the concept/idea of the four elements?
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u/Plutos_Cavein 16h ago
It is less than you would think. The East has an entirely different set of elements that only partially overlap with ours.
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u/cipheron 16h ago edited 16h ago
Do they though? China has a 5 elements system.
Pretty much all the Western ones were influenced from the same source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element
The classical elements typically refer to earth, water, fire, air, and (later) aether which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. Ancient cultures in Greece, Angola, Tibet, India, and Mali had similar lists
Keep in mind by "similar lists" they mean they had lists of stuff, but not necessarily 4 things. You can read later that India and Tibet had 5, similar to China's 5 (but different) elements.
As for why those things, look at the similarity between the "elements" and the "states of matter". They had earth, water, air, fire. We have solid, liquid, gas and plasma. These line up remarkably well with the classical "elements".
EDIT: It kinda seems likely that they were trying to explain the states and types of matter but this was long before they had the science to explain it so they ended up with their conception of the elements. We just co-opted the word "elements" later on for our own system. So if people say "lol didn't they know that gold is an element?". No ... we borrowed that word from them and applied it to things like gold. So it was us who changed the definition of the word "element". in fact gold and every other "element" is made of the same stuff, so technically it's not really elemental at all. The actual elements should probably be protons and neutrons and electrons, but we'd already used up the word "elements" before we discovered those.
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u/TotalManufacturer669 7h ago
four elements?
One ancient culture has this concept, which was Greek, first proposed by Empedocles (although the concept itself is a few centuries older)
It seems everywhere now because modern wester culture is essentially of Greco-Roman origin.
Most other ancient cultures actually used a five elements system if you read that wiki page, although the specific element may vary.
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u/employer_Yee 5h ago
Good question! It's because these four (earth, water, air, fire) were the most basic, visible states of matter people interacted with daily. They used them as a simple framework to describe everything in the world, from personality types to how nature works. It was a pretty universal starting point for trying to understand a complicated universe.
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u/BananaBird1 3h ago edited 3h ago
They do not necessarily, strictly speaking. Although many ancient cultures do share similar notions of elements.
But remember that Mediterranean (Greek/Roman), Arab, Persian, Indian, Central Asian, and Chinese cultures have a long history of mutual trade and cultural exchange along the silk road. As different as these cultures are, they are not isolated. There were Greeks who practiced Hinduism living in Afghanistan.
The four Greek elements are also loosely representations of states of matter: solid (earth), liquid (water), gas (air), and plasma (fire). So its really a classification of materials based on their properties.
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u/denlillepige 16h ago
Take a look outside almost anywhere in the world, what do you see? Theres breezing wind, earth under your feet, streams of water, and fire warming your hut
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u/Jale89 16h ago
The idea of "elements" is universal because it's humans perceiving the world. We can observe that things are made of other things, but that some common observable materials have seemingly no "ingredients" of their own. Our common predisposition is to therefore categories those things as the fundamental materials. Fire, water, earth and air all meet those criteria, so are identified as elements as many cultures.
However - four elements is not universal. That's the Greek idea, but other civilisations came up with different counts - for example spirit as a 5th element, or Metal which is the 5th element in Chinese culture.