HISTOKICAL TEADITION AND ORIENTAL RESEARCH 



By James Henky Bkeasted 

 University of Chicago 



It has often been remarked that the outstanding trait of the 

 untrained mind is credulity. The rationalization of man's views 

 of the world has been a very slow process and it is still very far 

 from a completed process. It has commonly been thought to have 

 begun with the Greeks, but its origin must be sought in the Orient 

 in a period long before Greek civilization had arisen. The Edwin 

 Smith Medical Papyrus, acquired in 1906 by the New York His- 

 torical Society, discloses the inductive process of scientific investiga- 

 tion already in operation in the seventeenth century before Christ. 

 For example, this document contains the earliest occurrence of the 

 word " brain " anywhere appearing in surviving records of the past. 

 The word is unlmown in Old Testament Hebrew, in Babylonian, 

 Assyrian,. or any of the ancient languages of Western Asia. The 

 organ itself, therefore, was evidently discovered and the recogni- 

 tion of its various functions was begun for the first time by these 

 physicians of early Egypt in the thousand years preceding the seven- 

 teenth century B. C. The observations recorded in the Edwin 

 Smith Medical Papyrus show that its author had already observed 

 that control of the members and limbs of the body was localized in 

 different sides of the brain; and the recognition of localization of 

 functions in the brain, mostly the work of modern surgeons within 

 a generation or two, had already begun in the seventeenth century 

 B. C, at a time when all Europe still lay in savagery or barbarism. 

 I hold in my hand part of an original transit instrument, made 

 as stated by the inscription upon it, by no less a king than Tutenkh- 

 amon, in the fourteenth century B. C. It did not come from the 

 tomb of Tutenkhamon, but was apparently made by him for the 

 tomb of his (or his wife's) great-grandfather, Thutmose IV (fif- 

 teenth century B. C). This and another such piece now at Berlin, 

 are the oldest scientific instruments of any kind now known to be 



1 Reprinted by permission from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 

 vol.- 10, No. 7, July 15, 1924. 



409 



