In Ancient Greek philosophy, an arche is a first principle from which other principles are derived. The concept of an arche was adapted from the earliest cosmogonies of Hesiod and Orphism, through the physical theories of Pre-Socratic philosophy and Plato before being formalized as a part of metaphysics by Aristotle. Etymology Arche sometimes also transcribed as arkhé) is an Ancient Greek word with primary senses "beginning", "origin" or "source of action": from the beginning, οr the original argument, and later "first principle" or "element". By extension, it may mean "first place", "method of government", "empire, realm", "authorities" "command". The first principle or element corresponds to the "ultimate underlying substance" and "ultimate indemonstrable principle". Mythical cosmogonies The heritage of Greek mythology already embodied the desire to articulate reality as a whole and this universalizing impulse was fundamental for the first projects of speculative theorizing. It appears that the order of "being" was first imaginatively visualized before it was abstractly thought. In the mythological cosmogonies of the Near East, the universe is formless and empty and the only existing thing prior to creation was the water abyss. In the Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish, the primordial world is described as a "watery chaos" from which everything else appeared. This watery chaos has similarities in the cosmogony of the Greek mythographer Pherecydes of Syros. In the mythical Greek cosmogony of Hesiod (8th to 7th century BC), the origin of the world is Chaos, considered as a divine primordial condition, from which everything else appeared. In the creation "chaos" is a gaping-void, but later the word is used to describe the space between the earth and the sky, after their separation. "Chaos" may mean infinite space, or a formless matter which can be differentiated. The notion of temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the religious conception of immortality. The conception of the "divine" as an origin influenced the first Greek philosophers. In the Orphic cosmogony, the unaging Chronos produced Aether and Chaos and made in divine Aether a silvery egg, from which everything else appeared. Ionian school The earliest Pre-Socratic philosophers, the Ionian material monists, sought to explain all of nature (physis) in terms of one unifying arche. This is considered as a permanent substance or either one or more which is conserved in the generation of rest of it. From this all things first come to be