Lineages of Learning

Abstract

In his account of the Egyptian king Sesostris, Herodotus recorded that the annual flooding of the Nile often left farmers owning less land and, therefore, owing less tax. To adjudicate disputes, Sesostris commissioned a team of inspectors to judge the amount of land that had been lost, and so to assess the new tax on the land. “I think,” added Herodotus, “this was the way in which geometry was invented, and passed afterwards into Greece – for knowledge of the sundial and the gnomon and the twelve divisions of the day came into Greece from Babylon.”.