als had gods, they would imagine them in their own forms (Lloyd, 1979, p. 12). Implicit in this statement was the argument that the gods of the Greeks (and other peoples) took human form because their worshippers invented them. Other consequences as well stemmed from the pre-Socratic revolution--for example, the notion of cosmology: that is, the idea that the size, shape, and nature of the Universe could be speculated about, and in principle at least could be measured and determined. In a real sense, Thales' theory of the physical universe differs only in details from the Big Bang theory of today; a profound gulf separates both from more traditional mythological explanations of the world.
Let us first consider the world views of the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians. The achievements of the Egyptians as engineers and practitioners of what may be called applied science were extraordinary. The Pyramids are only the most obvious surviving evidence of their ability to master difficult practical problems; the techniques of preservation used on the mummies those pyramids housed is another example. The Egyptians developed practical geometry, a necessity for land-measure in a country whose fertile land was regularly inundated by the Nile floods, obliterating boundary markers (Murray, 1964, pp. 187-89). The term geometry, "land measure" in Greek, testifies to the original source from which the Greeks themselves first learned this body of knowledge. The Egyptians' mastery of survey technique was such that they correctly measured within inches the fall of the Nile over seven hundred miles (Kitto, 1951, p. 177).
Egyptian astronomy does not appear to have contributed greatly to the tradition to which the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers applied themselves; the origin of their astronomical knowledge (and of the constellations we still refer to) was evidently Mesopotamian. The Egyptians did, however, observe and use the regularity of th...