On Egypt's shoulders.

Fred Reed's article "The Unbound West" (Oct. 5) and Hugh Mc Innish's reply, "Western Voltage," warrant a reply. Technological advancements in human history can be compared to a relay race. It was Newton who stated that he "stood on the shoulders of giants," meaning the ancient Egyptians, as he put in his Principia Mathematica. He was right: George Sarton--the well-known historian of science who examined the Edwin Smith papyrus, the world's earliest medical document, and its methodological instructions on how to conduct surgery on the human body--argued that empirical science began in Egypt. All credit is due to researchers like Maxwell, Planck, Bohr, and others for their efforts in modern science, but it must be recognized that without the concept of measurement, numbers, and empirical observation, their work would not have been possible. Ancient Egypt and Sumer are the shoulders here.

Note, too, that most of the technological inventions of the Greeks took place in Alexandria and not Athens (the seat of the arts), and figures like Euclid and Heron were Egyptian-born. Furthermore, Renaissance science in Europe was to a large extent carried on according to the neo-Egyptian tradition of Hermeticism--a paradigm to which researchers like Bruno and Newton subscribed.

So the argument that inventiveness is a purely Western characteristic is questionable. After all, Europeans have lived in Europe for the last 45,000 years, and it is only in the last 600 that reading and writing were introduced to Europe's heartland.

L. KEITA

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