"Euclid himself is an elusive figure. We know nothing of him from contemporary references … Euclid’s Elements, which is believed to have been compiled around 300 BC, gives us an edited and anonymous treatment of some of the mathematics of Euclid’s predecessors, in a text that has passed through the hands of an unknown number of further scribes and editors before arriving at the versions that we now possess. ...Our evidence concerning pre-Euclidean mathematics is so indirect and fragmentary that the greatest part of the stories that are now told about the period must be invention."

"Nothing Almost all of our texts come from Constantinople, the earliest from 888 AD, closer [in] time to us than to the supposed date of Euclid!"

"True, the discovery is also claimed for India. The work relied on is the Apastamba-Sulba-Sutra, the date of which is put at least as early as the fifth or fourth century B.C., while it is remarked that the matter of it must have been much older than the book itself ... There is a proposition stating the theorem of Eucl. I. 47 as a fact in general terms, but without proof […] Certain considerations suggest doubts as to whether the proposition had been established by any proof applicable to all cases. Thus Apastamba mentions only seven rational right angle triangles; he had no general rule such as that attributed to Pythagoras for forming any number of rational right-angle triangles; [his words imply] that he knew no other such triangles. […] the theorem is enunciated and used as if it were of general application; there is, however, no sign of any general proof; there is nothing in fact to show that the assumption of its universal truth was founded on anything better than an imperfect induction from a certain number of cases, discovered empirically, of triangles with sides in the ratios of whole numbers in which the property (1) that the square on the longest side is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two was found to be always accompanied by the property (2) that the latter two sides include a right angle."

"In the 1840s rival British and French teams began to uncover and document the remains of vast stone palaces near Mosul, now in northern Iraq but then part of the Ottoman Empire whose capital was Istanbul. The adventurers quickly identified the ruins they were digging as the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, known to them through the stories of the Old Testament and Classical authors. Thus they claimed it as part of their own, European heritage, and were little interested in its place in Middle Eastern history and tradition per se. Thus unwittingly the tone was set for interpreting ancient Assyrian – and, later, Babylonian and Sumerian – remains. […] The finds represented the ‘cradle of civilization,’ mankind’s first tottering steps toward European sophistication. [And] they were potential witnesses to events described in the Old Testament, appearing at a crucial juncture in Western European intellectual history […]. (Robson 2007: 59)."

"All our Greek texts of the Elements up to a century ago…purport in their titles to be either ‘from the edition of Theon’…or ‘from the lectures of Theon... [Greek commentaries] commonly speak of the writer of the Elements instead of using his name."

"Though this is the proposition universally associated by tradition with the name of Pythagoras, no really trustworthy evidence exists that it was actually discovered by him."

"For many people, the attraction of Plimpton 322 has been exactly its status as a ‘first infantile step’ on the way to modern Western-style mathematics. (Robson 2001)."