The Roman general who encamped his troops, laid out their tents on a rectangular pattern governed by the same idea.

The commissioners who assigned farming-plots on the public domains to emigrant citizens of Rome, planned these plots on the same rectangular scheme--as the map of rural Italy is witness to this day.
These Roman customs are very ancient.

Later Romans deemed them as ancient as Rome itself, and, though such patriotic traditions belong rather to politics than to history, we find the actual customs well established when our knowledge first becomes full, about 200 B.C.[53] The Roman camp, for example, had reached its complex form long before the middle of the second century, when Polybius described it in words.
Here, one can hardly doubt, are things older even than Rome.

Scholars have talked, indeed, of a Greek origin or of an Etruscan origin, and the technical term for the Roman surveying instrument, _groma_, has been explained as the Greek word 'gnomon', borrowed through an Etruscan medium.

But the name of a single instrument would not carry with it the origin of a whole art, even if this etymology were more certain than it actually is.