Sources

The problems confronting us when we wish to establish a firm textual basis for the study of Greek mathematics are entirely different from the ones we met in Babylonian mathematics. There our texts—the clay tablets—might be broken or damaged, and the terminology might be obscure and understandable only from the context. But one thing was beyond doubt, and that was the authenticity of the texts, for these were the very tablets the Babylonians themselves had written.

Let us now take Euclid's Elements, the work with which we shall be concerned in this chapter, as an example illustrating how different the situation is when we deal with Greek mathematical texts. It was written about 300 b.c., as we shall see, but the earliest manuscripts containing the Greek text date from the tenth century a.d., i.e., they are much closer in time to us than to Euclid.

Thus even our oldest texts are copies of copies of copies many times removed, and from these we must try to establish what Euclid himself wrote. This is a detective problem of no mean proportions, and classical scholars have developed refined techniques for solving it. The procedure is, in crude outline, as follows:

We compare maxiuscripts X and Y. If Y has all the errors and peculiarities of X and in addition some of its own, it is a fair assumption that Y is a copy, or a copy of a copy, of X.