Animadversions on the Origins of Western Science

Author(s): Martin Bernal

Source: Isis, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 596-607
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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the
on
Animadversions
of

Origins

Science

Western

By Martin Bernalt
SPENT THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS of my life trying to escape from the
shadow of my father, John Desmond Bernal, and hence, among other things,
from science and the history of science. Therefore,the trepidationthat is proper
for anyone who is neither a scientist nor a historianof science writingfor Isis is
multipliedmanyfoldin my case. Nevertheless, I am gratefulfor the invitationto
put forwardmy views on the origins of Western science.
Any approach to this question immediately stumbles over the definition of
"science." As no ancient society possessed the modern concept of "science" or
a word for it, its applicationto Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, or Greece is
bound to be an arbitraryimposition. This lack of clarity is exacerbated by the
clash between historians,like David Pingree,who are concerned with "sciences"
as "functioningsystems of thought" within a particularsociety and those who
apply transhistoricalstandardsand see "science" as "the orderly and systematic
comprehension, description and/or explanationof naturalphenomena . . . [and]
the tools necessary for the undertakingincluding, especially, mathematics and
logic."' I should add the words "real or imagined"after "naturalphenomena."
Pingree denounces the claims of what he calls "Hellenophilia"that "science"
is an exclusively Greek invention owing little or nothing to earlier civilizations
and that it was passed on without interferenceto the Western Europeanmakers
of the "scientificrevolution."Puzzlingly, the work of Otto Neugebauer-and his
school, includingPingree himself-on the extent and sophisticationof Mesopotamian astronomy and mathematics and Greek indebtedness to it, as well as
M. L. West's demonstrationof the Near Eastern influences on the Presocratic
cosmologies, appearsto have left this kind of thinkingunscathed.2
J

t Departmentsof Governmentand Near Eastern Studies, CornellUniversity, Ithaca, New York

14853.
I could not have begun, let alone completed, this paper without many years of patient help and
encouragementfrom JamilRagep, who, it shouldbe pointedout, is far from acceptingall my conclusions.
1 For Pingree see "Hellenophiliaversus the History of Science," a lecture originallypresentedat
the Departmentof Historyof Science, HarvardUniversity, 14 November 1990,and now publishedin
this special section. For the passage cited see G. E. R. Lloyd, Early GreekScience: Thales to Aristotle (New York/London:Norton, 1970),p. 1, quotingMarshallClagett, GreekScience in Antiquity:

How Human Reason and Ingenuity First Ordered and Mastered the Experience of Natural Phenom-

ena, new correcteded. (New York: Collier, Macmillan,1962),p. 15.

2 See Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (New York: Dover, 1969); and M. L.
West, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)-pace John Vallance, "On
Marshall Clagett's Greek Science in Antiquity," Isis, 1990, 81:713-721, on p. 715. See also G. S. Kirk,

"Popperon Science and the Presocratics,"Mind, 1960,69:318-339,esp. pp. 327-328;and Kirk,

ISIS, 1992, 83 . 596-607

596

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CULTURESOF ANCIENT SCIENCE

597

There are still defenders of the claim that "Thales [seen as a Greek] was the
firstphilosopherscientist"-the word "scientist"being used here in the positivist
sense. According to G. E. R. Lloyd, the Greeks were the first to "discover nature," "practicedebate," and introduce such specifics as the study of irrational
numbers(notably V2) and geometricalmodelingfor astronomy. Lloyd sees the
discovery of natureas "the appreciationof the distinctionbetween 'natural'and
'supernatural,'that is the recognition that naturalphenomena are not the products of randomor arbitraryinfluencesbut regularand governed by determinable
sequences of cause and effect."3 However, it is clear that at least by the second
millenniumB.C. Mesopotamianastronomy and Egyptian medicine, to take two
examples, were concerned with regularand, if possible, predictablephenomena
with relatively little supernaturalinvolvement.4
It is true that Egyptian medicine contained some religion and magic. At one
point even the "scientific" Edwin Smith Papyrus on surgery turns to magical
charms. However, E. R. Dodds and others have shown how isolated the natural
philosophers'criticismwas against the widespreadGreek belief in the efficacy of
magic.SEven Hippocraticmedicine, which is generallyregardedas highly rational, was institutionallycentered on the religious cult of Asclepius and his serpents, which laid great emphasis on the religiouspractice of incubation.Both the
cult and the practice, incidentally,had clear Egyptianroots.6
On the question of the alleged uniqueness of Greek "scientific"debate, as we
can see from those in Gilgamesh, "debates" are at least as old as literature.
Some, such as the "Dispute between a man and his Ba," which dates back to
Middle Kingdom Egypt, contain quite profoundphilosophy. It is also clear that
different Mesopotamian, Syrian, and Egyptian cities had not merely different
gods but distinct cosmogonies, most of which involved abstract elements or
forces without cults, of which the priesthoods of the others were aware. There
were also attempted and actual syncretizations, suggesting that there had been
debates.7This situationresembles that plausiblyreconstructedfor the cosmological disputes of the Presocratics.
Later Greek philosophical and scientific debates clearly owed a great deal to
the Sophists, who came from the Greek traditionof "persuasion,"with its close
"Common-Sensein the Developmentof Greek Philosophy,"Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1961, 81:
105-117, pp. 105-106.
3 Lloyd, Early Greek Science (cit. n. 1), p. 8.
4 Neugebauer,Exact Sciences in Antiquity(cit. n. 2), pp. 29-52; Paul Ghalioungui,The House of
Life: Per Ankh Magic and Medical Science in Ancient Egypt, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: B. M. Israel,

1973);and Ghalioungui,The Physicians of Ancient Egypt (Cairo: Al-AhramCenter for Scientific

Translation,1983).
S E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. CaliforniaPress,
1951);G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason, and Experience(Cambridge:CambridgeUniv. Press, 1979),
pp. 10-58, 263-264; and Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late

Pagan Mind (Cambridge:CambridgeUniv. Press, 1986),pp. 81-82.

6

J. B. de C. M. Saunders, The Transition from Ancient Egyptian to Greek Medicine (Lawrence:

Univ. Kansas Press, 1963),p. 12.

7

See E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians: Studies in Egyptian Mythology, 2 vols.

(London:Methuen, 1904),Vol. 1, pp. 282-287;and MarshallClagett,AncientEgyptianScience, Vol.

1: Knowledgeand Order,2 pts. (Philadelphia:AmericanPhilosophicalSociety, 1989), pp. 263-372.
For an annotatedtranslationof the "Disputebetween a man and his Ba" see MiriamLichtheim,
Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3 vols., Vol. 1: The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley/Los Angeles:

Univ. CaliforniaPress, 1975),pp. 163-169.

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598

BERNAL: ANIMADVERSIONS

association with legal disputes. Oratory,persuasion,andjustice are highly valued

in nearly all cultures, but, interestingly, they received particularemphasis in
Egypt. The central scene in Egyptianiconographyis the judicial weighing of the
soul of the dead person, and the legal battle between Horus and Seth is a central
episode in its mythology. One of the most popularEgyptiantexts was that of The
Eloquent Peasant, which its most recent translatorinto English, MiriamLichtheim, describes as "both a serious disquisition on the need for justice and a
parableon the utility of fine speech."8
I have written elsewhere on the centralityof the image of Egyptianjustice to
both Mycenaean and Iron Age Greece, and there is no doubt that Greeks of the
Classical and Hellenistic periods saw Egyptianlaw as the ultimatebasis of their
own. As Aristotle wrote at the end of the Politics: "The history of Egypt attests
the antiquity of all political institutions. The Egyptians are generally accounted
the oldest people on earth;and they have always had a body of law and a system
of politics. We ought to take over and use what has already been adequately
expressed before us and confine ourselves to attemptingto discover what has
alreadybeen omitted."9
While the first attestation of written law in Egypt comes from the tomb of
Rekhmirein the fifteenthcentury B.C., there is no reason to doubt that it existed
much earlier.10In any event, the Egyptian New Kingdom is sufficientlyold by
Greek standards.It is clear that what Aristotle was recommendinghad not hitherto been carriedout. Nevertheless, it would seem likely that Aristotle was conventional in his belief that, even though Egyptian and Greek law were very different in his own day, the true foundationof Greek law andjustice lay in Egypt.
The emphasis on law is importantboth because of its promotionof argument
and dialectic and because of the projections of social law into nature and the
establishmentof regularities.'1There is no doubt that the Egyptian M3t (Maat:
"truth,""accuracy," "justice")was central to both social and naturalspheres in
the same way as the GreekMoira, which derivedfrom it. Similarly,it is clear that
the Egyptians applied the "justice" of scales to social and legal life at least as
early as the Middle Kingdom.12
To return to some of the specific claims made for the originality of Greek
science, there is now no doubt that Babylonian scholars were concerned with
2 and Pythagoreantriples as well as having a good approximationof 'a. The
Egyptian estimate for wrwas even more accurate. The standarduse in land mea8 Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 1, p. 169.
9 Aristotle, Politics, 7.10, trans. Ernest Barkerin ThePolitics of Aristotle (Oxford:Oxford Univ.

Press, 1958), p. 304. See Martin Bernal, "PhoenicianPolitics and Egyptian Justice in Ancient
Greece," in Der Anfang des politischen Denkens bei den Griechen, ed. Kurt Raaflaub (Munich:

HistorischesKolleg, forthcoming).
1oA. Theodorides, "The Concept of Law in Ancient Egypt," in The Legacy of Egypt, ed. J. R.
Harris(Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1971),pp. 291-313;and Anne Burton,DiodorusSiculus Book I: A
Commentary(Leiden: Brill, 1972),pp. 219-225.
" See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilizationin China, Vol. 2 (Cambridge:CambridgeUniv.
Press, 1956),pp. 518-583.
12 Bernal, "PhoenicianPolitics and Egyptian Justice' (cit. n. 9). Clagett subtitles Volume 1 of
AncientEgyptianScience "Knowledgeand Order"(cit. n. 7), pp. xi-xii. These words are translations
of the Egyptianrhtand MY1t,which he sees as the Egyptian"rudimentary"science. See the constant
referencesto balancesand plumblinesas symbolsof justice in TheEloquentPeasant, trans. in Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature (cit. n. 7), Vol. 1, pp. 170-182.

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CULTURES OF ANCIENT SCIENCE

599

surementof the diagonalof a squareof one cubit was the so-called double remen,
that is to say \/2 times the cubit.13 Thus the irrationalnumberpar excellence was
employed in Egypt from the beginningof the second millenniumB.C. at the latest;
whether or not its irrationalitywas proved in Euclideanfashion, its use provides
circumstantialevidence that Egyptian scribes were aware of the incommensurability of the side and the diagonal.
Modern scholars have poured scorn on the widespreadancient traditionholding that Egyptians had known of the "Pythagorean"triangle.However, the very
cautious Gay Robins and CharlesShute have accepted Beatrice Lumpkin'sargument that knowledge of it is shown by the use in Late Old Kingdompyramidsof
a seked of 54 palms, which imposed "a half-base width to height of 3:4 and so
could have been modelled on a 3:4:5 right angled triangle."14
I shall discuss the strong possibility that geometry, thought to be typically
Greek, came from Egypt. However, at this point it would seem difficultto argue
that before the second half of the fourth century B.C. any aspect of Greek "science"-with the possible exception of axiomatic mathematics-was more advanced than that of Mesopotamiaor Egypt.
WAS NEUGEBAUER RIGHT TO DISMISS ANCIENT TRADITIONS OF EGYPTIAN SCIENCE?

In this section I should like to take it as given that R. 0. Steuer, J. B. de C. M.

Saunders, and Paul Ghaliounguihave established not merely that Egyptianmedicine contained considerable "scientific"elements long before the emergence of
Greek medicine, but that Egyptianmedicineplayed a centralrole in the development of Greek medicine.15Similarly,the work of Neugebauerand his school has
made it impossible to deny that some Mesopotamianmathematiciansand astronomers were "scientific"in the positivist sense and that Mesopotamian"science"
in these areas was crucial to the creation of Greek mathematicsand astronomy.
However, I should like to challenge these scholars' dismissal of claims that there
was an Egyptian mathematics that could have had a significant influence on
Greek thinkers.
13 For the triples see the bibliographyat the end of Olaf Schmidt, "On Plimton322: Pythagorean
Numbersin BabylonianMathematics,"Centaurus,1980,24:4-13, on p. 13. On the Egyptianestimate

for IT see Richard Gillings, Mathematics in the Time of the Pharaohs (New York: Dover, 1972), pp.
142-143; and Gay Robins and Charles Shute, The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus: An Ancient Egyptian

Text (London: British Museum Publications, 1987), pp. 44-46. On the double remen see Gillings,
Mathematics in the Time of the Pharaohs, p. 208.
14 Gay Robins and Charles Shute, "MathematicalBases of Ancient Egyptian Architectureand
Graphic Art," Historia Mathematica, 1985, 12:107-122, on p. 112; and Beatrice Lumpkin, "The
Egyptian and PythagoreanTriples," ibid., 1980, 7:186-187. See also Gillings, Mathematics in the

Time of the Pharaohs, app. 5.

15 See Ghalioungui, House of Life (cit. n. 4); Ghalioungui, Physicians of Ancient Egypt (cit. n. 4);
R. 0. Steuer and J. B. de C. M. Saunders, Ancient Egyptian and Cnidian Medicine: The Relationship
of Their Aetiological Concepts of Disease (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1959); and
Saunders, Transition from Ancient Egyptian to Greek Medicine (cit. n. 6). Pace J. A. Wilson, "Medicine in Ancient Egypt," Bulletin of Historical Medicine, 1962, 36(2):114-123; Wilson, "Ancient
Egyptian Medicine," editorial in Journal of the International College of Physicians (Sect. 1), June
1964, 4J(6):665-673; and G. E. R. Lloyd, introduction to The Hippocratic Writings, ed. G. E. R.

Lloyd (London:Penguin, 1983),p. 13n. Even the skepticalHeinrichvon Staden, who is very reluctant to concede Egyptianinfluenceson Hellenisticmedicine,admitsthat the study of pulses and their
timingby water clocks, for which his subjectHerophilusof Alexandriawas famous, probablycame
from the Egyptian tradition: von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (Cam-

bridge:CambridgeUniv. Press, 1989),p. 10.

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Despite his early passion for ancientEgypt and his considerablework on Egyptian astronomy, throughouthis long life Neugebauerinsisted that the Egyptians
had no original or abstract ideas and that mathematicallyand scientificallythey
were not on the same level as the Mesopotamians.He claimed that the accurate
astronomicalalignmentsof the pyramidsand temples in Egypt and the use of ir
and 4 could all be explained as the results of practical knacks rather than of
profound thought. An example of this approachis the following: "It has even
been claimed that the area of a hemispherewas correctly found in an example of
the Moscow papyrus, but the text admits also of a much more primitiveinterpretation which is preferable." 16
In his Exact Sciences in AntiquityNeugebauerdid not argue with the pyramidological school; he simply denounced it, recommendingthat those interested in
what he admittedto be "the very complex historicaland archaeologicalproblems
connected with the pyramids" read the books by I. E. S. Edwards and J. F.
Lauer on the subject.17
While Edwards does not involve himself with the pyramidologistsand their
calculations, the surveyor and archaeologistLauer did, in the face of opposition
from Egyptologists, who were "astonishedthat we should give so much importance to the discussion of theories which have never had any credit in the Egyptological world." Lauer's work had a certain contradictoryquality. He admitted
that the measurementsexhibitedby the pyramidsdo have some remarkableproperties; that one can find such relations as ir, +, and Pythagoras'striangle from
them; and that these facts generally bear out the claims Herodotus and other
ancient writers made for them. On the other hand, he denouncedthe "fantasies"
of pyramidologistsand claimed that the formulas according to which the pyramids were aligned and the extraordinarydegree of sidereal accuracy they exhibited were purely the result of "intuitiveand utilitarianempiricism."18
A conflict between the acceptance of the extraordinarymathematicalprecision
of the Great Pyramid and a "certainty"that the Greeks were the first "true"
mathematiciansruns throughoutLauer's manywritingson the subject. The strain
is made still harderto bear by Lauer's awarenessthat some Greeks had been told
about many of this pyramid's extraordinaryfeatures and that they believed the
Egyptians to have been the first mathematiciansand astronomers. Moreover,
there was the problem that so many of the Greek mathematiciansand astronomers had studied in Egypt. Lauer's honest attemptto deal with these difficulties
was the following:
Even though up to now, no esoteric Egyptianmathematicaldocumenthas been discovered, we know, if we can believe the Greeks, that the Egyptianpriests were very
jealous of the secrets of their science and that they occupied themselves, Aristotle
tells us, in mathematics. It seems then reasonably probable that they had been in
possession of an esoteric science erected, little by little, in the secrecy of the temples
duringthe long centuriesthat separatethe constructionof the pyramids,towards the
16
Neugebauer,Exact Sciences in Antiquity(cit. n. 2), p. 78 (italics added). I shall challengethis
interpretationbelow.
17

Ibid., p. 96.

18 J. F. Lauer, Observations sur les pyramides (Cairo: Institut

Frangais d'Arch6ologie Orientale,

1960),pp. 11, 10, 4-24 (here and elsewhere, translationsare my own unless otherwiseindicated).

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year 2800 [I should put it two hundredyears earlier],to the eve of Greek mathematical thoughtin the sixth century B.C. As far as geometryis concerned, the analysis of
buildingsas famous as the GreatPyramidwould take a notableplace in the researches
of these priests; and it is perfectly conceivable that they could have succeeded in
discoveringin it, perhapslong after their erection, chance qualitiesthat had remained
totally unsuspectedto the constructors.19
The question of when Egyptians developed this sophisticated mathematical
knowledge is not directly relevant to the topic of this article. However, apart
from the precision and intricacy of many of the architectural constructions of the
Old Kingdom, there is another argument for the existence of relatively "advanced" mathematics in the first half of the third millennium B.C. This is that
although the two great mathematical texts that have survived, the Moscow and
the Rhind papyri, come from the Middle Kingdom in the twentieth and nineteenth
centuries B.C., some of the problems set in them use measures that belong to the
Old Kingdom, which had been discarded by this time.20
Lauer's solution still allowed some later Egyptians to have been capable of
relatively advanced thought. He continued:
For the whole length of the three thousandyears of her history, Egypt thus, little by
little, preparedthe way for the Greekscholarswho like Thales, Pythagoras,and Plato
came to study, then even to teach, like Euclid at the school in Alexandria.But it was
in their philosophicspirit,which knew how to drawfrom the treasureamassedby the
technical positivism of the Egyptians, that geometry came to the stage of a genuine
science.21
Even this degree of recognition was too much for Neugebauer. As he put it at
one point: "Ancient science was the product of a very few men and these few
happened not to be Egyptians." In 1981 he published his note "On the Orientation of Pyramids," in which he showed how accurate alignments could be made
without sophisticated astronomy, simply by measuring and turning the shadow of
a model pyramid or the capstone over a period of some weeks. There is no
evidence, one way or the other, whether this was the method used, but it would
seem plausible, if only because pyramids appear to have had solar rather than
stellar cultic associations. Nevertheless, the requirement of what Neugebauer
concedes to be "remarkable accuracy of . .. orientation of the Great Pyramid,"
a structure of extraordinary sophistication, indicates very serious religious and
theoretical concerns.22 Thus, Neugebauer's choice of the word "primitive" to
describe the alignment seems inappropriate; the word is-as we shall see-indicative of his general opinion of the ancient Egyptians.
There is little doubt that this modern view of the Egyptians' lack of mathematics and science has been influenced by a distaste for the theology and metaphysics in which much of Egyptian-and Platonic-knowledge was embedded and by
progressivist views that no one who lived so early could have been so sophisti19 Ibid., pp. 1-3. For a more skepticalview of this see Robins and Shute, "MathematicalBases"
(cit. n. 14), p. 109.
20
21

Robins and Shute, Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (cit. n. 13), p. 58.

Lauer, Observations sur les pyramides (cit. n. 18), p. 10.

22

Neugebauer,Exact Sciences in Antiquity(cit. n. 2), p. 91; and Neugebauer,"Onthe Orientation

of Pyramids," Centaurus, 1980, 24:1-3, on p. 2.

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cated. It may also have been reinforcedby assumptions, almost universal in the
nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, that no Africansof any sort could have
been capable of such great intellectualachievements.
An indication that such attitudes may have had an impact even on such a
magnificentchampion of liberalism and foe to racism as Neugebauer comes in
one of his bibliographicalnotes, where the first book he recommended "for a
deeper understandingof the backgroundthat determinedthe characterof Egyptian arithmetic" was Lucien Levy-Bruhl's Fonctions mentales dans les societes

inferieures.Levy-Bruhlwas far from the worst of his generation.Nevertheless he

belonged to it, and it was appropriatethat his work was translatedinto English as
How Natives Think.23

Having said this, there is no doubt that Neugebauerhad some substantialarguments to back his case. The strongestof these were his claims that none of the
survivingmathematicalpapyrifrom pharaonicEgypt containedwhat he believed
to be sophisticatedcalculationsand that the Egyptians' systems of numbersand
fractions were too crude for profoundmathematicaland astronomicalthought of
the kind that had been attributedto them. There are seven major arguments
against this position.
1. The strong possibility that-pace Neugebauer-the survivingEgyptianpapyri do
contain "advanced"mathematics.
2. Parallelsfrom Mesopotamiaand PtolemaicEgypt showingthat one cannot rely on
the papyrologicalrecord to gauge the full range of pharaonicEgyptian "science."
3. The general agreementthat Egyptiangeometrywas equal to or better than that of
Mesopotamia, in conjunction with the conventional wisdom that one of the chief
contributionsof the Greeks to Mesopotamian"arithmetic"was geometric modeling,
which suggests that the geometricalinput may well have come from Egypt.
4. The coordinationof sophisticated geometry and computationin Egypt with extraordinarypracticalachievements.
5. The Greek insistence that they learned mathematics-and medicine-not from
Mesopotamiabut from Egypt.
6. The Greek adoptionof an Egyptianratherthan a Mesopotamiancalendar.
7. The facts that much of Hellenistic and Roman science took place in Egypt, not
Greece, and that althoughthey wrote in Greeksome of its practitioners,includingthe
astronomerPtolemy, were Egyptian.

The first argumentis buttressedby the fact that, as we have seen, Neugebauer
preferred"more primitiveinterpretations"and therefore could have overlooked
evidence of more sophisticatedwork. Thus we must allow for the possibility that
the survivingtexts contain or refer to elements that are more sophisticatedthan
he and some other twentieth-centuryhistoriansof science have supposed. There
is little doubt about the employmentof irrationalnumbers,mentionedabove, and
the use of arithmeticaland geometricalprogressionsin the Rhind Papyrusproblems 40 and

79.24

The Soviet scholar V. V. Struve, who was the firstto study the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus, was much more respectful than Neugebauer. He wrote, for
instance, that "we must admit that in mechanics the Egyptianshad more knowl23

Neugebauer, Exact Sciences in Antiquity, p. 92; and Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think

(New York: Knopf, 1926).

24 Robins and Shute, Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (cit. n. 13), pp. 42-43, 56.

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edge than we wanted to believe." He was convinced that this papyrus and the
Rhind Mathematical Papyrus demonstrated a theoretical knowledge of the volume of a truncated pyramid, and he has been followed in this interpretation by
later scholars. Given the many pyramids successfully constructed during the Old
and Middle Kingdoms, this would not in itself seem unlikely. Archimedes, however, maintained in the third century B.C. that the volumes of pyramids were first
measured by Eudoxos of Knidos a hundred years earlier.25
Here, as in some other instances, Archimedes was knowingly or unknowingly
mistaken. Even so, it is possible that Eudoxos was the first to transmit the formulas to Greece. Eudoxos spent many years in Egypt and was reported to have
learned Egyptian and to have made translations, some of which may well have
come from the Book of the Dead, into Greek. As Giorgio de Santillana pointed
out, it is unlikely that Eudoxos translated these texts merely for their entertainment value; it is much more probable that he believed that they contained esoteric astronomical information.26 This raises the important suggestion that Egyptian religious and mystical writings and drawings may well contain esoteric
mathematical and astronomical wisdom.
To return to earth with the particular case of the measurement of the surface
area of either a semicylinder or a hemisphere in the Moscow Papyrus: Richard
Gillings, who believes the measurement refers to the latter, describes the Egyptian operations and writes:
If this interpretation... is the correct one, then the scribe who derived the formula
anticipatedArchimedesby 1,500 years! Let us, however, be perfectly clear [that] in
or Ahemisphere = 27Tr2been
neither case has any proof that either Acylinder = 1-rTdh
2
established by the Egyptian scribe that is at all comparablewith the clarity of the
demonstrationsof the Greeks Dinostratosand Archimedes.All we can say is that, in
the specific case in hand, the mechanicaloperationsperformedare consistent with
these operations which would be made by someone applying these formulas even
though the order and notation mightbe different.27
In general, it is clear that the specifically mathematical papyri give considerable indications of sophisticated operations. As Struve put it in the conclusion of
his study of the Moscow Papyrus:
These new facts throughwhich the Edwin Smith and Moscow papyrihave enriched
our knowledge, oblige us to make a radicalrevision of the evaluationmade up to now
of Egyptian "science" [Wissenschaft].Problems such as the research into the functions of the brainor the surfacearea of a spheredo not belongto the rangeof practical
"scientific"questions of a primitiveculture. They are purely theoreticalproblems.
25

V. V. Struve, "MathematischerPapyrus des staatlischen Museums der schonen kuinste in

Moskau," Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik (Pt. A), 1930, 1:184; and Paul Ver

Eecke, Les oeuvres completes d'Archimede(Paris:Blanchard,1960),p. xxxi. Among later scholars

who have supportedStruve's view (on pp. 174-176) see Gillings, Mathematicsin the Time of the
Pharaohs (cit. n. 13), pp. 187-194; and Robins and Shute, Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, p. 48.
26

Giorgiode Santillana,"On ForgottenSources in the History of Science," in ScientificChange:

Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social, and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and
Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, ed. A. C. Crombie (London: Heinemann, 1962),

pp. 813-828, on p. 814.

27

Gillings, Mathematics in the Time of the Pharaohs (cit. n. 13), p. 200.

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Or earlier:
The Moscow Papyrus ... confirmsin a strikingway the mathematicalknowledgeof
the Egyptian scholars and we no longer have any reason to reject the claims of the
Greek writers that the Egyptianswere the teachers of the Greeks in geometry.28

Objectionsby Neugebauerand others to Struve's specific interpretationof the

surface area of a hemispherehave now been answered.29Similarly,as mentioned
above, claims for the use of "Pythagorean"trianglesand the sophisticationof the
measurementof the volume of the truncatedpyramidhave both survived earlier
skepticism. If these bases of Struve's general case still stand, should one accept
Neugebauer's dismissal of it?
Even if one were to concede Neugebauer's argumentthat the mathematics
contained in these papyri is merely practical and primitive, there is the second
argument:the strong likelihood that more sophisticated work was recorded on
others that have not been preserved. Lauer raised the point that all reports indicate that the Egyptianpriests were secretive about their writings;thereforethere
would have been few copies and the chances of their survival would have been
slim. It should be emphasized that relatively few papyri of any kind have survived. This is very differentfrom Mesopotamia,where the baked clay tablets are
remarkablydurable and hundreds of thousands of them have been discovered.
The problem with Mesopotamiantexts is not a lack of them but the difficultyof
finding enough Assyriologists to read and publish them. Even here, however,
there are gaps in what exists. Neugebauerpoints out that the "greatmajority"of
mathematicaltablets come from one of two periods, the Old Babylonian period-of two hundredyears-in the first half of the second millenniumB.C. and
the Seleucid period. Continuitiesbetween the two sets of texts make it clear that
sophisticated mathematicswas carried out in the twelve or more centuries that
intervened. However, there is no record of this.30
The situation is far worse in Egypt, and there is no doubt that most of the
papyri written and all of those that have survived were texts used for teaching
scribes techniques that were useful for practicalaccountingratherthan "state of
the art"advancedmathematics.31 An instructiveparallelcan be seen in the Ptolemaic period. Many more mathematicalpapyri have been found from these few
centuries than from the whole pharaonicperiod, yet none of these go beyond
book 1 of Euclid or give any indicationsof the extraordinarysophisticationof the
work we know from textual transmissionto have been takingplace in Hellenistic
Egypt. Thus the argumentfrom silence, which should always be applied sparingly, should be used with particularcaution in evaluatingthe absence of textual
proof of advanced Egyptian mathematics.
Against this, it is arguedthat the few texts that do exist show a consistency of
techniques and notation that makes it impossible for the Egyptians to have produced sophisticated mathematics. This brings us to the third argumentagainst
skepticism:Egyptiannumericalnotationmay not have been as flexible and helpStruve, "MathematischerPapyrus"(cit. n. 25), pp. 183, 185.
Gillings,Mathematics in the Time of the Pharaohs (cit. n. 13), pp. 194-201.
30
Neugebauer,Exact Sciences in Antiquity (cit. n. 2), p. 29.
31 Robins and Shute, Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (cit. n. 13), p. 58.

28
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ful as that of the Mesopotamians,but it was, if anything,better than that in which

the Greeks wrote their sophisticatedformulas. There is no doubt that Egyptian
mathematicswas based on very simple principles;on the other hand, the existing
papyri show that extraordinarilyelaboratemathematicalstructureswere erected
upon them.
Neugebaueradmitsthat while the Egyptianswere not as good in their arithmetic as the Babylonians,their geometrywas equally good; and if we are to believe
other scholars' interpretationsof the Moscow Papyrus, Egyptians were able to
carry out geometricaloperationsthat were beyond those of the Mesopotamians.
The notion that the Egyptians were the better geometers fits both with their
unparalleled architectural achievements and with their reputation among the
Greeks as the founders of geometry and their teachers in it.32
Given this concern with geometry, it is not surprisingthat there are many
direct and indirect proofs that Egyptians relied on plans for their architectural
constructions. Struve may have been exaggeratingwhen he wrote, "The Egyptian plans are as correct as those of modernengineers."33Nevertheless, there is
no reason to suppose that they were inferiorto those of the Greeks and Romans.
Accordingto the Egyptians, the traditionof makingplans went back to Imhotep, at the beginning of the third dynasty, circa 3000 B.C., but most modern
scholars have understood this claim merely as a mythical projection onto the
deified prototype of all architects. However, it is now proven that architectural
plans were used duringthe Old Kingdomand that Imhotep did design the Step
Pyramidand the elaborate complex of buildingsaroundit. Furthermore,an ostracon found at the Step Pyramiddoes contain measurementsfor a vault.34
This coordinationof geometry and computationwith architectureconstitutes
the fourth argumentagainst moderndenials that the Egyptianspossessed a superior mathematics. While the textual evidence for such knowledge can be construed as ambiguous, the case for it is greatly strengthenedby the architectural
evidence. In addition to the pyramidsthere were temples, granaries,and irrigation networks on huge scales that requiredextraordinaryplanningand the ability
to visualize these structuresin advance on writingor drawingsurfaces.
The fifth reason for supposingthat the Egyptianshad sophisticatedmathematics is that the Greeks said so. Writerson the subject were unanimousthat Egyptian mathematicsand astronomywere superiorto their own and that while only
two Greek mathematicianswere supposed to have studied in Mesopotamia, the
majority of Greek scientists, astronomers, and mathematicianshad studied or
spent time in Egypt.
These reportsare treatedwith skepticismby modernhistoriansof science, who
know that there was no Egyptian science or mathematicsworth studying. How32 See Herodotos, 2.109;DiodorosSikeliotes, 1.69.5, 81.3, 94.3; Aristotle,Metaphysics1.1. (981b);
Hero, Geometria2; Strabo, 16.2, 24 and 17.1, 3; and Clementof Alexandria,Stromateis 1.74.2. See

also Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology, trans. Yaa-Lengi

Meema Ngemi (New York: LawrenceHill, 1991),pp. 257-258.

33 Struve, "Mathematischer
Papyrus"(cit. n. 25), pp. 163-165,on p. 165.
34 Sergio Donadoni, "Plan,"in LexikonderAgyptologie,ed. WolfgangHelck and EberhardOtto, 5
vols. (Wiesbaden:Harrassowitz, 1977-1984),Vol. 4, cols. 1058-1060. For my dating see Martin
Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 2: The Archaeological

and DocumentaryEvidence(London:Free AssociationBooks; New Brunswick,N.J.: RutgersUniv.

Press, 1991),pp. 206-216.

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BERNAL: ANIMADVERSIONS

ever, as de Santillanawrote about Eudoxos, who undoubtedlystudied in Egypt:

"We are asked to admit, then, that the greatest mathematicianof Greece learned
Egyptian and tried to work on astronomyin Egypt without realizingthat he was
wasting his time."35
There is little doubt that after the Persian conquests the mathematicsand astronomy of Egypt drew from both Egyptian and Mesopotamiansources. However, the Greek belief that it was an Egyptiantraditionstrengthensthe case that
the native component was significant.
The sixth argumentagainst the skeptics is the fact that the Greeks adopted an
Egyptian rather than a Mesopotamiancalendar. Apart from the greater convenience of the Egyptiancalendar,this adoptionis indicativeof what seems to have
been a wider Greektendency to drawfrom nearbyEgypt ratherthan more distant
Mesopotamia.
The final argument is that in Hellenistic times, while Athens remained the
center of Greek philosophical studies, nearly all "Greek"science took place in
Egypt. This was partly the result of Ptolemaicpatronage,but if we are to believe
Greek and Roman sources, they also drew and built on Egyptian wisdom. It is
striking that Euclid worked in Egypt at the very beginning of the Ptolemaic
period, that is to say a mere fifty years after Eudoxos had felt the need to learn
Egyptian in order to study mathematics and astronomy. Thus, it would seem
more accurate to view Euclid's work as a synthesis of Greek and Egyptian geometry than as an imposition of the Greek rational mind on muddled oriental
thinking.
While it is true that Babylonianmathematicsand astronomy flourishedunder
the Seleucids, as already noted, most of the great "Greek" scientists wrote in
Greek but lived in Egypt, and some indeed may have been Egyptian. For example, the astronomerPtolemy was known in early Arabic writings as DAc acid,
"the Upper Egyptian."36
It seems to be generally accepted that the great Greek contributionto mathematics and astronomy was the introductionof geometric modeling, in particular
the transpositionof Mesopotamianarithmeticalastronomicalcycles into rotating
spheres.37However, the Greeks themselves believed that geometry developed in
Egypt, a view supportedby Egyptian architecturalsophisticationand the mathematical papyri. Furthermore,those most responsiblefor the Greek view of the
heavens as spinning spheres, Plato and Eudoxos, were reported to have spent
time in Egypt and were known for their deep admirationof Egyptian wisdom.38
We have seen how particularlyclose Eudoxos's association was with Egyptian
priests, and it was precisely Eudoxos who established the new astronomy of
complex concentric spheres.
I believe that these seven argumentspresent a very strong case indeed that
there were rich mathematical-particularlygeometrical-and astronomicaltraditions in Egypt by the time Greek scholars came in contact with Egyptianlearned
priests. After the first Persianconquest of Egypt, in the sixth centuryB.C., EgypDe Santillana,"ForgottenSources"(cit. n. 26), p. 814.
J. F. Weidler,Historia astronomiae (Wittenberg:Gottlieb, 1741),p. 177.
37 Pingree, "Hellenophiliaversus the History of Science" (cit. n. 1).
38 See the bibliographyin WhitneyDavis, "Platoon EgyptianArt," Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 1979,66:121-127,on p. 122, n. 3.
3

36

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tian mathematicsand astronomywere substantiallyinfluencedby Mesopotamian

"scientific"thought, a process which continuedin Ptolemaicand RomanEgypt.39
The Egyptian medical traditionappearsto have been less affectedby Mesopotamia. In general, the "scientific"triumphsof Hellenistic Egypt would seem to be
the result of propitioussocial, economic, and political conditionsand the meeting
of three "scientific"traditions,those of Egypt, Mesopotamia,and Greece. However, the two former were much older than the third, reachingback to the third
millenniumor beyond, and more substantial. It should also be noted that the
point at which the Greeks "pluggedinto" Near Eastern "science"was Egypt; this
was the reason that the Greeks always emphasizedthe depth and extent of Egyptian wisdom.
The arbitrarinessof the applicationof the word "science" to ancient civilizations was noted at the beginningof this essay. I suppose, like Humpty-Dumpty,
we can use words more or less as we please. However, the only way to claim that
the Greeks were the first Western scientists is to define "science" as "Greek
science." If less circular definitions are used, it is impossible to exclude the
practice and theory of some much earlierMesopotamiansand Egyptians.
3 A clear example of this can be seen in the fragmentdiscussed by Neugebauerin his exquisite
swan song: Neugebauer,"A BabylonianLunarEphemerisfrom RomanEgypt," in A ScientificHumanist: Studies in Memory of Abraham Sachs, ed. E. Leichty et al. (Occasional Publications of the

Samuel Noah KramerFund, 9) (Philadelphia:University Museum, Univ. Pennsylvania,1988), pp.

301-304.

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