Abstract
As a society, it is obvious that we are very impressed with the sophistication of our modern technology. It is also evident that the theoretical basis for this technology is fancy mathematics. Not surprisingly then, although not everybody can do advanced math, we consider our society to be advanced both in terms of knowledge base and physical know how. At the same time however, we tend to be very disparaging of ancient societies. Evolutionary preconceptions certainly lend themselves to the idea that ancient peoples were primitive, with few skills and even less understanding. Sometimes however we discover details about ancient peoples that shake our feelings of superiority.