Uh. You wanna.. add a bit more content to your first post perhaps to include your thoughts? (this is a very high class place, not presumptuous, just if it were a dining venue it'd be jackets required, no caps)

Well so the story goes all life came from water. No planet can sustain life without it really. We drink it, obviously. It forms mountains, beaches. Allegedly God killed everyone alive with it one time. It's pretty universal come to think of it.

Way back in the day, I did a teaching exercise regarding the books of the major religions in which I told the students we were going to 'follow the water'. It's really a very fascinating exercise. One can do a search for all passages in the books that reference 'water' and see what all transpired because of cultures gathering around and involving water. I even refer to the archetypal representations of oases and wells in my most recent writing. ....... I can understand Thales' perspective that water is 'archical'.

What I read is that Greeks of Thales era were just beginning to deal with the problem of "the one and the many." The idea is that most of us are interested in how this differs from that, being already comfortable with the ideas of thisness and how, for example, we're all and everything pretty much the same stuff.

But the for the ancient world, everything was different, and each had its own science, not unified on any shared principles with other sciences, and apparently this differentness had reached a dead-end. Therefore for Thales to say the world was made of one thing was a big deal, and his contemporaries agreed.

And it was a preliminary step in developing unifying principles among the sciences. Although any short summary of ancient Greek thought shows that their discussion on the one and the many went back-and-forth. And still does. What do you say? Are you made of one thing or many things? At the least, due in part to Thales, you have pretty much a unified and consistent science with which to investigate the answer. Caveat: this is by no means as simple a subject as it may seem or as some people may present it - that is, in some ways it leads to many.