The normative structures of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian sciences: A fundamental reconsideration

(provisional working title)

International conferences and postdoctoral projects

Responsible for the project: Prof. Dr. Annette Imhausen and Prof. Dr. Tanja Pommerening

Project description

At all times, there have been privileged corpora of knowledge that had a normative character. In the modern age, the term “science” has emerged for one of these bodies of knowledge. The affiliation of a discipline to privileged knowledge, as well as its formal characteristics and its normative effectiveness are – contrary to the naïve notion associated with modern science – not “naturally” present, but are determined individually by each culture and society (Chalmers 2013), as even a superficial glance at their terms Wissenschaft – science – sciences in three languages (German, English, French) reveals. For example, “science” encompasses both the humanities and the natural sciences, while in English a fundamental distinction is made between sciences (natural sciences) and humanities(humanities). The question of the “belonging” of bodies of knowledge to this corpus of privileged knowledge has always been controversial and still is today (keyword “pseudosciences” and demarcation problem; cf. Laudan 1983, who convincingly explains the problem with evidence, see as a (late) reaction e.g. the collection of essays in Pigliucci and Boudry 2013). The now recognized cultural-sociological component of the definition and development of “privileged knowledge” (sociology of scientific knowledge), especially in a historical perspective that is oriented towards the longue durée, has the consequence that it is essential to include the emic perspective of the relevant cultures to determine what belongs to privileged knowledge.
This requirement has fundamental consequences for the history of science. In its genesis, the history of science, like the history of medicine and the history of mathematics, was understood as the disciplinary history of the natural sciences. At least in its early days, the genesis of disciplines was viewed retrospectively from a modern point of view and thus also based on a (naïve) modern concept of (natural) science. This approach created a problem for early cultures, especially ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, in classifying the content of scholarly (scientific) texts, as they were understood as early precursors of later knowledge, but never as independent knowledge complexes with their own specifics.
The problem described is also reflected in literature. For example, the basic outline of ancient Egyptian medicine was fed with selected medical texts (Deines, Grapow, Westendorf 1958-1973). Magical elements, which also occur in the papyri, were not taken into account. The starting point of the collection was what constitutes medical science today, which does not include magic. Due to this approach, a “success story” was written for Egyptian medicine in the history of medicine and Egyptology (which is largely due to the interpretation of Edwin Smith’s surgical papyrus), while there was initially no interest in Mesopotamian medicine – due to what historians perceived as a further mixing of magic and medicine. Herodotus’ (misleading) conclusion that the Babylonians had no physicians was carried forward for a long time (cf. Maul 2001). A similar finding, this time with reversed success stories, can be observed in the history of astronomy. Mesopotamia, the place where mathematical astronomy was developed towards the end of the first millennium BC, was the winner of the comparison between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Egypt, as Michael Hoskin stated in 2003, had not been able to understand the more complex movements of stars and planets through primitive mathematics (Hoskin 2003: 8).
The work that has been done within the early history of science (including the history of medicine and the history of mathematics) has now made it very clear that an etic perspective is not expedient if a deeper understanding of early scholarship is to be achieved. Corresponding literature that makes this clear has long been available (see, for example, Cancik 2010). There is also literature that consciously addresses the historiographical problems of modern concepts with regard to ancient cultures – one example is the volume “The History of Mathematical Proof in Ancient Traditions” edited by Karine Chemla, in which the way in which mathematical pre-Greek sources are dealt with is placed in the Orientalism debate and critically scrutinized (Chemla 2012). An even more far-reaching example is Francesca Rochberg’s new book “Before Nature”, which, based on the finding that the concept of “nature” used in later times – i.e. the object of research in the natural sciences – did not exist in Mesopotamia, calls for a study of Mesopotamian sources that takes this into account and at the same time demands a place for Mesopotamian knowledge in the history of science (Rochberg 2016). In order to make it easier for those who are new to the topic of science in pre-modern cultures or who come from a neighboring discipline to get started, the volume “Translating Writings of Early Scholars” was published in 2016, focusing precisely on the problem of the conflict between modern Ettic and early Emic concepts and terms and how to deal with it (Imhausen and Pommerening 2016). This volume forms the starting point for the long-term project that has already begun, in the context of which the content of the early history of science is to be fundamentally redefined. The need for precisely this research project within the early history of science arises from the results of the projects on the normative orders of early scientific texts on the one hand and the large volumes on early science recently published by renowned publishers (Cambridge History of Science , Vol. 1: Ancient Science (Taub and Jones 2018) and The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine
in the Classical World (Keyser and Scarborough 2018), in which the focus for Egypt and Mesopotamia is on the three ancient disciplines postulated in the 19th century (mathematics, astronomy and medicine). Such a representation no longer corresponds to today’s knowledge of the available source material, restricts our access to these earliest scholarly texts and results in a distorted picture of early science at best. The aim of the project briefly outlined here is to determine, from a perspective that is as culturally immanent as possible, which disciplines exist, how these disciplines can be summarized in terms of personnel and philological evidence, and which normative characteristics they had and in turn brought about.
One strand of this project is formed by a series of major international conferences, whose contributions are to be further developed into coherent overviews of early sciences in subsequent workshops. The first of these conferences, which will focus on the concepts and the normative orders created by them within Egyptian and Mesopotamian scholarship, is planned for early 2020. A further strand consists of postdoctoral projects that investigate newly emerging areas of scholarship (such as divination).
In contrast to the earlier history of science, which only looked “backwards” from a modern point of view, the aim of this project is to pursue the history of science “forwards” from its beginnings, as proposed by Francesca Rochberg for the classification of Mesopotamian astral science (Rochberg 2015). To this end, cross-epochal and cross-cultural conferences with specific questions can be used to critically question the traditional orientalist demarcation of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Cited literature
Cancik, Eva. 2010. “Subject and Method: Linguistic Cognitive Techniques in the Cuneiform Tradition of Mesopotamia”. In Annette Imhausen and Tanja Pommerening (eds.): Writings of Early Scholars in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Translating Ancient Scientific Texts (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 286). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter: 13-45.
Chalmers, Alan. 2013. what is this thing called science. 4th edition. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Chemla, Karine (ed.). 2012. The History of Mathematical Proof in Ancient Traditions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deines, Hildegard von, Hermann Grapow and Wolfhart Westendorf. 1958-1973.Grundriß der Medizin der Alten Ägypter. Volumes I-IX. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Hoskin, Michael. 2003. The History of Astronomy. A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Imhausen, Annette and Tanja Pommerening (eds.). 2016. Translating Writings of Early Scholars in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Methodological Aspects with Examples (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 344). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter
Keyser, Paul and John Scarborough. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Laudan, Larry. 1983. “The Demise of the Demarcation Problem”. In: Robert S. Cohen and Larry Laudan (eds.): Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum . Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Reidel Publishing: 111-127.
Maul, Stefan M. 2001. “Die Heilkunst des Alten Orients”. Medizinhistorisches Journal 36: 3-22.
Pigliucci, Massimo and Maarten Boudry (eds.). 2013. Philosophy of Pseudoscience. Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem . Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.
Rochberg, Francesca. 2015. “Conceiving the History of Science Forward”. In: Brooke Holmes and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer (eds.): The Frontiers of Ancient Science: Essays in Honor of Heinrich von Staden (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 338). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter: 515-532.
Rochberg, Francesca. 2016. Before Nature. Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science . Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Taub, Liba and Alexander Jones. 2018. Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 1:Ancient Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

International conferences
Further information will follow