It is an instructive fact for epistomology in general that the deductive sciences arose long before the experimental sciences. Even if mathematics passed through an empirical phase (Egyptian mathematics, which moreover was a technique rather than an enquiry having a truly scientific objective), it reached a much higher level of elaboration with the Greeks than did their physics. Whilst the Elements of Euclid provided a model of axiomatic deduction which over a long period was considered as complete, Greeks physics only consisted of a systematisation of the data of common sense (Aristotle's physics), or in very partial results expressed in a deductive and non-experimental manner (Archimedes' statics) or again in diverse attempts at celestial mechanics foreign to true experimentation. We had to wait for the 17th century (in spite of several precursors at the end of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance) for a physics which had a methodological autonomy comparable to that which it exhibits today.