Hi Hermione,

Are you implying a title or epithet would be the only way to substantiate the fact they were 'mathematicians'?

On a historiographical note, there is a general fault evident in this line of enquiry that is a common characteristic of extreme skeptics, namely: the erroneous assumption that something has to be directly attested textually before it can be declared historical fact.

Petrie destroyed this erroneous assumption 120 years age, so to continue to resort to it is to use an obsolete argument. Here's another quote from Margaret Murray's 'The Splendour that was Egypt' showing that she was in fact more up to date than some of the extreme skeptics on this site, who still assume that texts are the only class of evidence that is available:

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"They were the slaves of the written word, and believed nothing that was not vouched for by documentary evidence. But even documents were not always above suspicion if they did not agree with preconceived ideas, and Herodotus’s accounts of were treated with scorn. It was considered clever to say of Herodotus “Father of History, Indeed! Father of Lies more likely!” To these people Greek Art was a sacred thing, which had come into the world full-blown. Greek literature also had no beginning. They were not quite separate and special creations of God, but were very nearly so, and it was almost blasphemy to suggest that when the Greeks themselves said how much they owed to Egypt they might in fact have been speaking the truth.
Into this milieu came Petrie’s bombshell. Inductive Metrology intimated to the learned world that a new method of investigation had come into existence, a method in which the written word had no part, and which proved that there was a form of culture and civilisation before the time of the Greek"

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Dave L



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/30/2007 05:38AM by Dave L.