Otto Neugebauer, Historian

Abstract

Reviewing a recent book in the journal Isis, a historian of modem science felt it necessary, when introducing Otto Neugebauer, to qualify him as "the storied professor of ancient mathematics".1 The tribe of historians of science, that is to say, received a reminder in one of their omnibus journals about the stature of one of their greatest adepts. No doubt each generation establishes a canon of texts, and, in the process, some voices tend to be forgotten. Yet the need to identify Otto Neugebauer to the community best qualified to appreciate him marks a special feature of our own age, Postmodernity, where rapid changes in intellectual temperament and socio-economic outlook promote superficial generality and make a virtue of eclecticism. Neugebauer, although he acted as a unique bridge between mathematics, philology, and history in the twentieth century, believed that understanding emerged through the labour of particular disciplines. Even though Neugebauer was a modern man and would have felt out of place in Postmodernity, his scholarly vision is still very much with us. The following pages look into his early years, when the vision took shape.To begin with Egyptian mathematics and then to consider the traces of Babylonian mathematics, in the manner of Otto Neugebauer, is a search for origins and, once the origins are revealed, is an invitation to follow the original expression in subsequent formulations. Neugebauer's is a project about transmission and adaptation, or, to use a term now in vogue, appropriation. Fundamental to the project is identification of the sensibility of a particular time - its Zeitgeist, esprit du temps, Weitanschauung, or to use Karl Lamprecht's fertile notion borrowed from music, its Diapason. In this undertaking, one interrogates the manifestations of personality and the effects of contingent events to determine the extent to which they are characteristic of a time and place; the determination made, one then compares the material things under consideration - texts, images, artificial monuments - with material representations in other times and places. From this point of view, people are a vehicle for the expression of ideas.History can be a record of events and actions, as in Thucydides; a moral argument with a caution for the future, as in the chronicles of the early Roman Empire; or a rationalization of temporal authority, following Hegel. History respects the constraint of chronology (notwithstanding anti-chronological commentary by partisans of histoire croisee), but it is not the recitation of events on a space-time line.2 The persistent diversity of form in historical writing suggests the pertinence of applying structural analysis to prose, and, following Hayden White, explorations have been made in this direction.3 The grasp of history sub specie oeterni extends a persistent allure, from Ernst Cassirer and Arthur Lovejoy to, in his last writings, Thomas Kuhn.4 For all this, we are, in our daily life, condemned to struggle against the bounds of convention, that is to say, against style and the mechanism of its authority.Although Otto Neugebauer was at home with the notion that thought is constrained by material circumstances, his style does not guide his history. His prose, although it makes use of irony, is direct and uninflected - his large works are not symphonies in the sense of Brahms, and his shorter articles do not read as if they were chamber music. Neugebauer sensed that an over-emphasis on style, as such, can do violence to the dissemination of significant intellectual accomplishments.Otto Neugebauer was orphaned at an early age. Instruction was peripatetic, possibly irregular, during his last Gymnasium years.5 He fought, as a teenager, in a particularly stupid war. He fled his home twice. Whether these events left a trace on his scholarship is a matter for future investigation, subject to the discovery of relevant documentation.Neugebauer believed in the advancement of learning by way of discussion within a community of technical experts. …