One of the oldest and most complete diagrams from Euclid’s Elements of Geometry is a fragment of papyrus found among the remarkable rubbish piles of Oxyrhynchus in 1896-97 by the renowned expedition of B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt. It is now located at the University of Pennsylvania. The diagram accompanies Proposition 5 of Book II of the Elements, and along with other results in Book II it can be interpreted in modern terms as a geometric formulation of an algebraic identity – in this case, that ab + (a-b)2/4 = (a+b)2/4.

Casselman, Bill. “One of the oldest extant diagrams from Euclid,” Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia.