Leonid Zhmud The Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity

harpedonap-
tai,
74
apparently did not evoke such claims
. The Egyptian origin of geometry
seems then to be Herodotus’ own conclusion, a quite natural one, taking into
account how old Egyptian civilization was.
75
If geometry appeared first in
Egypt and then in Greece, any other conclusion was ruled out. The possibility
of two independent discoveries was not even considered.
76
Herodotus’ infer-
ence must have seemed all the more conclusive to him, since he says that the
Egyptians avoid adopting not only Hellenic customs but anything foreign at all
(II, 91).
In view of Herodotus’ general tendency, it appears strange that while re-
peatedly praising Egyptian medicine he does not say that it was borrowed by
the Greeks. The Egyptians are the healthiest people in the world, with the ex-
ception of the Libyans. They live healthily (II, 77) and their medicine is at such
a high level that the whole country is full of doctors, each specializing in a par-
ticular kind of ailment, for example, ocular, dental, internal, etc. (II, 84). Never-
theless, neither in book II nor in the passage about Greek physicians (III, 125,
129–137) is there any hint that medicine originated in Egypt. Furthermore, the
story of the Crotonian physician Democedes, who cured the Persian king Da-
rius after the best Egyptian doctors failed in the case (III, 129), seems to dem-
onstrate the superiority of Greek over Egyptian medicine. The historian’s re-
serve in this matter may well be one of the reasons why the idea of the Oriental
origin of medicine never enjoyed particular popularity in later literature.
77
73
Vogt,
op. cit.
74
See Democr. 68 B 299; Gands, S. Die Harpedonapten oder Seilspanner und Seil-
knüpfer,
Q & St 1 (1930) 255–277.
75
Lloyd, A. B.
Herodotus Book II. Commentary 1–98, Leiden 1976, 34.
76
Edelstein’s objections (
op. cit., 88) are based on a misinterpretation of an Aristote-
lian passage (
Pol. 1329b 25f.) that says that the same things are invented in different
successive civilizations and then get lost because of catastrophes. See Aristoteles.
Politik. Buch II, transl. by E. Schütrumpf, Berlin 1993, 205f.; cf. Cael. 270b 19f.,
Met. 1074b 10f.
77
Cf., however, Isoc.
Bus. 22 and below, 8.4.

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Chapter 1: In search of the first discoverers
40
At one point Herodotus corrects the notion of Egyptian superiority in astron-
omy, ascribing the invention of the gnomon and polos and the division of the
day into 12 hours to the Babylonians.
78
He may not have seen a gnomon in
Egypt and may have noticed it only in Babylon, though this instrument was
known, in fact, in both cultures. As for the polos, Herodotus could not have
seen it outside Greece, for its hemispherical form implies a notion of the
heavenly sphere that was foreign to both the Babylonians and the Egyptians.
The division of the day into 12 parts (by analogy, probably, with the division of
the year into 12 months) was known in Egypt already in the second millennium,
and it is from Egypt, not Babylon, that the Greeks must have borrowed it. Thus,
neither confidence in priests nor independent reasoning could protect Herodo-
tus from mistakes, despite all his aspiration to truth.
While the Egyptian and Phoenician discoveries were mentioned in the ear-
lier Greek literature, Herodotus was the first to refer to borrowings from Baby-
lon. Though he does not call Babylonians the
pro¯toi heuretai, this is clearly
suggested by the context of all his accounts of Greek borrowings from them.
Another way Herodotus differs from the preceding heurematography is that he
writes of scientific discoveries, or at least of the things that came to be under-
stood as such later. After Herodotus, the idea that geometry originated in Egypt
and astronomy in Babylon (or in Egypt) became commonplace and survived
until the end of Antiquity; later it passed into medieval and early modern his-
toriography. Since the fourth century, Egypt and Babylon are joined by Phoeni-
cia as the motherland of arithmetic (Eud. fr. 133; cf. Pl.
Leg. 747a–c). Herodo-
tus does not assert this directly, but in his account of the origin of the Greek
alphabet in Phoenicia he notes: “These Phoenicians who came with Cadmus…
among many other kinds of learning (Álla te pollà didaskália) brought
into Hellas the alphabet” (V, 58). It is hard to say definitely whether these
“kinds of learning” included the art of calculation, but this conjecture seems to
me quite plausible.
What can explain Herodotus’ persistent efforts to emphasize the non-Greek
origin of many discoveries and, further, to interpret typically Greek customs as
borrowings? The reason is hardly his individuality as a historian, nor the