For most of human history, knowledge of the world has been collected by direct observations through the senses. Few exact measurement techniques were developed until the scientific revolution in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Thus, the older world was largely devoid of “data” in the modern sense. There are exceptions that confirm the rule, primarily the field of astronomy, where data was collected from an early age. The planets’ movements relative to the constellations are slow enough to be tracked with an almanac, while their position could be fixed quite exactly with simple instruments for angular measurement and knowledge of geometry. This bias toward astronomy in early data collection might help explain why ancient geometry seems so advanced compared to the state of the sciences and mathematics in general at the time—and the advanced state of geometry made it an ideal for other intellectual fields.