ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY 
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Phoenicians owing to its use in commerce and contracts, so 
geometry was discovered in Egypt for the reason aforesaid.’ 
Tradition as to the origin of geometry. 
Many Greek writers besides Proclus give a similar account 
of the origin of geometry. Herodotus says that Sesostris 
(Ramses II, circa 1300 b.c.) distributed the land among all the 
Egyptians in equal rectangular plots, on which he levied an 
annual tax; when therefore the river swept away a portion 
of a plot and the owner applied for a corresponding reduction 
in the tax, surveyors had to be sent down to certify what the 
reduction in the area had been. ‘ This, in my opinion {SoKeei 
fj.cn)’, he continues, ‘was the origin of geometry, which then 
passed into Greece.’ 1 The same story, a little amplified, is 
repeated by other writers, Heron of Alexandria, 2 Diodorus 
Siculus, 3 and Strabo. 4 True, all these statements (even if that 
in Proclus was taken directly from Eudemus’s History of 
Geometry) may all be founded on the passage of Herodotus, 
and Herodotus may have stated as his own inference what he 
was told in Egypt; for Diodorus gives it as an Egyptian 
tradition that geometry and astronomy were the discoveries 
of Egypt, and says that the Egyptian priests claimed Solon, 
Pythagoras, Plato, Democritus, Oenopides of Chios, and 
Eudoxus as their pupils. But the Egyptian claim to the 
discoveries was never disputed by the Greeks. In Plato’s 
Phaedrus Socrates is made to say that he had heard that the 
Egyptian god Theuth was the first to invent arithmetic, the 
science of calculation, geometry, and astronomy. 5 Similarly 
Aristotle says that the mathematical arts first took shape in 
Egypt, though he gives as the reason, not the practical need 
which arose for a scientific method of measuring land, but the 
fact that in Egypt there was a leisured class, the priests, who 
could spare time for such things. 6 Democritus boasted that no 
one of his time had excelled him ‘ in making lines into figures 
and proving their properties, not even the so-called Harpe- 
donaptae in Egypt ’." This word, compounded of two Greek 
words, dpntSovr] and utttclv, means ‘ rope-stretchers ’ or ‘ rope- 
1 Herodotus ii. 109. 2 Heron, Geom. c. 2, p. 176, Heib. 
3 Diod. Sic. i. 69, 81. 4 Strabo xvii. c. 3. 
5 Plato, Phaedrus 274 c. 6 Arist. Metaph. A. 1, 981 b 28. 
7 Clem. Strom, i, 15. 69 (Vorsokratiker, ii 3 , p. 128. 5-7).