TITLE: The historical development of automorphic geometry
QUESTION [5 upvotes]: Background:
  Today the notion of automorphic geometry is often framed in the context of the Langlands program, in particular what is sometimes called the Langlands reciprocity conjecture. This is often phrased as the expectation that all motives are automorphic. The historical development of this notion is fairly extensive, and can certainly be traced back more than a century to the work of Felix Klein and his student Adolf Hurwitz. One historical thread that therefore could be identified is the "elliptic lineage", with important contributions from  Klein, Hurwitz,  Hecke, Artin, Eichler, Taniyama, Shimura, Weil, Langlands, Deligne,  Serre, Wiles, Taylor, and probably others.
I'm mainly interested in whether the notion of automorphic geometry (motives) has roots that go back farther than Klein and Hurwitz, but I'd also like to use this historical framework to ask what other "automorphic lineages" might be identified, possibly with overlaps with the elliptic lineage above.
Questions:
1) Is there work on automorphic geometry that predates that of Klein and Hurwitz? 
2) Are there other lineages in the automorphic genealogy?

REPLY [2 votes]: A common answer to question 1 is to mention the entries of Gauss's diary from 1814, including famously (but not restricted to) the last one, in which he studies some properties of biquadratic reciprocity and their links with the division of the lemniscate. Gauss understood these properties to derive from properties of Punktgitter (lattices of points) in the complex planes and his formulation is surprisingly close to the statement that (some) elliptic curves with CM are automorphic objects. 
Though I am not sure that this is the best way to think about the work of Gauss from a historical point of view (he himself seems to have been unsatisfied with this work and to have considered it of relatively low value compared to the latter approach of Einsenstein) and though these findings had no impact on mathematics at the time for the simple reason that they were kept private for over 80 years, it certainly counts as work in "automorphic geometry" done in the early XIX° century.