Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jun 1981
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1981bgeod..55..132f&link_type=abstract
Bulletin Géodésique, Volume 55, Issue 2, pp.132-142
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The first land surveyors were rope stretchers and rope knotters, remembered in ancient documents and tomb paintings and also in some terminology. The L-shaped carpenter’s square, one of the earliest and most versatile basic tools, represents the observed direction of the plumb line versus the water level and appears as the shadow-casting gnomon and also as the geometrical gnomon in magically-restricted enlargements of altars. The related “Pythagorean” theorem was known in antiquity centuries before Pythagoras, with algebraic proofs in Babylonia and China. The spherical shape of the earth, deduced from the observation of circumpolar stars, was part of a complete equatorial astronomical system in ancient China. But although shadow measurements were generally used to establish north-south distances, only the Greeks derived from them the size of the earth. The striking difference between the abstract, geometric approach of Greece and the concrete, algebraic approach of Babylonia and China represents not a difference in talents but a difference in culture-bound interests.
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