page_title: History of scientific method
section_title: Ancient Egypt and Babylonia
hierarchical_section_title: History of scientific method / Early methodology / Ancient Egypt and Babylonia
caption_attribution_description: English: The Edwin Smith papyrus, the world's oldest surviving surgical document. Written in hieratic script in ancient Egypt around 1600 B.C., the text describes anatomical observations and the examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of 48 types of medical problems in exquisite detail. Among the treatments described are closing wounds with sutures, preventing and curing infection with honey and moldy bread, stopping bleeding with raw meat, and immobilization of head and spinal cord injuries. Translated in 1930, the document reveals the sophistication and practicality of ancient Egyptian medicine. Plate 6 and 7 of the papyrus, pictured here, discuss facial trauma. Français&#160;: Le papyrus Edwin Smith est le plus ancien document original traitant de chirurgie. Écrit en caractères hiératiques pendant le Nouvel Empire de l’Égypte antique, vers le XVIIe siècle avant notre ère, ce traité décrit avec force détails les observations anatomiques et cliniques, les traumatismes et les traitements appliqués pour 48 affections médicales relevées sur un grand nombre de cas, ainsi que les pronostics associés à ces traitements. Il mentionne différents actes chirurgicaux, la fermeture avec les premières descriptions connues des sutures des plaies thoraciques. On y trouve aussi des traitements préventifs ou curatifs, des pharmacopées antibiotiques proposés pour lutter contre les infections avec le miel et le pain moisi, l’arrêt des hémorragies avec de la viande crue, et l’immobilisation des blessures à la tête et à la moëlle épinière. Traduit dans les années 30, le document révèle la sophistication et la praticité de la médecine de l’ancienne Égypte. Les planches 6 et 7 présentées ici discutent des traumatismes faciaux.
context_page_description: The history of scientific method considers changes in the methodology of scientific inquiry, as distinct from the history of science itself. The development of rules for scientific reasoning has not been straightforward; scientific method has been the subject of intense and recurring debate throughout the history of science, and eminent natural philosophers and scientists have argued for the primacy of one or another approach to establishing scientific knowledge. Despite the disagreements about approaches, scientific method has advanced in definite steps. Rationalist explanations of nature, including atomism, appeared both in ancient Greece in the thought of Leucippus and Democritus, and in ancient India, in the Nyaya, Vaisesika and Buddhist schools, while Charvaka materialism rejected inference as a source of knowledge in favour of an empiricism that was always subject to doubt. Aristotle pioneered scientific method in ancient Greece alongside his empirical biology and his work on logic, rejecting a purely deductive framework in favour of generalisations made from observations of nature.
context_section_description: There are few explicit discussions of scientific methodologies in surviving records from early cultures.  The most that can be inferred about the approaches to undertaking science in this period stems from descriptions of early investigations into nature, in the surviving records.  An Egyptian medical textbook, the Edwin Smith papyrus, (c. 1600 BCE), applies the following components: examination, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis, to the treatment of disease,  which display strong parallels to the basic empirical method of science and according to G. E. R. Lloyd played a significant role in the development of this methodology. The Ebers papyrus (c. 1550 BCE) also contains evidence of traditional empiricism.
  By the middle of the 1st millennium BCE in Mesopotamia, Babylonian astronomy had evolved into the earliest example of a scientific astronomy, as it was "the first and highly successful attempt at giving a refined mathematical description of astronomical phenomena." According to the historian Asger Aaboe, "all subsequent varieties of scientific astronomy, in the Hellenistic world, in India, in the Islamic world, and in the West – if not indeed all subsequent endeavour in the exact sciences – depend upon Babylonian astronomy in decisive and fundamental ways."
  The early Babylonians and Egyptians developed much technical knowledge, crafts, and mathematics used in practical tasks of divination, as well as a knowledge of medicine, and made lists of various kinds. While the Babylonians in particular had engaged in the earliest forms of an empirical mathematical science, with their early attempts at mathematically describing natural phenomena, they generally lacked underlying rational theories of nature.
caption: The Edwin Smith papyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical textbook of c. 1600 BCE, set out an  empirical method.
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