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What sorts of new questions did the early Greeks (particularly the Ionians) ask about society and the natural world that other Near Eastern cultures did not consider?

Does this help? I found this online, with the source stated at the bottom

How and why the Ionian philosophers began to think about existence and the universe is of course very difficult to explain. There are three possible causes:

1. When they examined the beliefs in gods and spirits, they discovered that most of them had names which reflected what kind of natural force they represent. So there was thunder and the god of thunder, but both had the same name. What happens if we delete the name from the list? Obviously nothing, because thunder will still occur. So the name of a god is maybe superfluous?

2. But to think like this, there needs to be a special condition in society, which is that the thinker must have the freedom under the law to think any way they like. In ancient Greece, many of the tribes had democratic constitutions, which means that freedom of thought was possible.

3. The earliest of these thinkers came from Miletus, which was at the cross-roads of many cultures. So they knew all the superstitions of the Persians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Lydians etc. When they compared them with their own beliefs, they saw remarkable similarities and started wondering if there were better, more logical reasons to explain the world.