In my engineering degree, I have learnt much about surveying. I have had jobs surveying, and have completed many courses on the subject. What surprised me was how little about this history I was taught. As I am seeing more often through the lens of this course, the majority of my STEM knowledge has been warped by western-centrism. I was only taught about how the Europeans used surveying, and the history of it was only taught back to the middle ages of British Kings. This article is amazing, and I feel robbed of this knowledge. I will ensure that my students will not suffer the same fate.
We have so much evidence of these different measurements, and the article mentions what they Egyptians knew about angles. I wonder how little they actually knew. Not every brilliant idea is recorded, so I can't help but think that there is something that the evidence is not telling us. We see that they have seqets for vertical angles, but that does not explain how they determined lateral angles. Perhaps there was a rule of thumb that surveyors of the time used, which was only passed on by word of mouth between generations.
The text mentions surveying techniques being used by priests and cultists. I wonder how much spiritual emphasis was placed on these mathematical concepts. We have heard the story of Pythagoras' math religion, but I know nothing about how math impacted Egyptian religion. Again, this is due to the western lens I have been taught through, but I wish to delve deeper to uncover the answer.
I think it's great to draw upon your background in engineering and knowledge of surveying! And what an interesting observation: that not every brilliant idea is recorded (and also that recorded ideas can be lost over time). It's great to hear that you will help your students learn that the history of surveying goes back millennia earlier than medieval British kings!
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