"The history of the

Egyptian math is what you can call somewhat lost in time.

Everything we know about it originates from two 18’long papyrus rolls and a few dried and inscribed pieces of leather.

This can mean two things: Either the Egyptians weren’t very interested in mathematics, or most of their calculations have disappeared in the whirlpools of time. The latter is by far the most likely. After all, you need some knowledge in geometry, among other things, to construct pyramids, sphinxes and other such wonders.

The problem with Egyptian scribes was that they, unlike the Babylonians, wrote on papyrus and not clay tablets. As we all supposedly know, papyrus rots away after a while, whereas clay does not. The result is that we have some 400 clay tablets, which consist of pure Babylonian Math, but at the same time, only about 36’ of Egyptian math is available.

The origins of Egyptian mathematics was largely dependent on the changes of climate near the end of the Stone Age, and indeed very similar to the origins of Babylonian and Chinese mathematics. When the climate changed in the stone age (about 3000 BC), people in Europe, Southern Africa, Southeast Asia and Eastern, North and South America found that the forests were expanding and taking over the savannahs. For them the change was easy. Moving from savannahs to forests takes only minor adjustments. For the inhabitants of Northern Africa, China and the Middle East things were tougher. They found that rivers were drying up and deserts near them were expanding. So they had to find more fertile land with animals to hunt and water to drink. The place all of these peoples winded up was by rivers. Egyptians by the Nile, Babylonians between the Tigris and Euphrates and some Chinese by the Yellow River. All of these communities had to start to find other means of getting food than to hunt, because there weren’t enough animals, so they started irrigating the areas around the rivers. Along with the irrigation came the mathematics. The new farmers had to build dikes and keep records of when the floods and rain seasons came, so they invented mathematics, calendars and almanacs. Land owners also had to keep track on how much they produced and what they owned. Then the cities came, and with them priests, scribes and bureaucrats, and all who needed mathematics in their day to day operations. It’s about here that the different levels of mathematic understanding starts to show, because the relatively peaceful Nile did not demand such extensive engineering and administrative efforts, as did the more erratic Tigris and Euphrates. In addition the Babylonians was located on a number of great caravan routes, Whereas Egypt stood in semi-isolation.

The first step towards written numbers was taken when tally marks came into use, probably in pastoral societies, to record the counting of relatively large numbers of animals. In ancient Egypt, probably as much as 4000-5000 years ago, the priests and scribes took a step further by inventing a system of numerals, which varied according to the size of the number. You gave the individual numerals, and the number of each in the grand total. Using these number-signs, the Egyptians could add, subtract, multiply and divide. But they had now special symbols for these operations. Instead they use the system we now call: "rhetorical algebra". Alongside the numeral, they gave a form of words describing what had to be done.

Egyptian numbers were written from right to left. After the fashion of the time, Ahmes did not use -or have- any signs for equals, plus or minus or for multiply and divide. He wrote fractions as single numbers with a dot over the top (e.g. 5): denominators without nominators. They are called ‘unit fractions’, because the numerator is always the same: one. It suggests that the original use of fractions was to divide out shares of food and drink, like many of the problems in the Rhind papyrus is about dividing up loaves of bread and jugs of beer. The layout of each group of numbers implicitly states the nature of the problem to be showed.

Following is an example of a list dividing loaf and bread:

Egyptian arithmetic has long been devalued because it lacks a sign for zero and has no place-system. Egyptian scribes used a completely different set of rules. They indicated units, tens and hundreds by means of different numerals, not by position. One of the advances Egyptian mathematicians made on the Babylonians was to indicate which parts were fractions and which were whole numbers. The notation that different symbols should be used for different ‘levels’ of tens made the zero unnecessary.

The system the Egyptians used was simpler, and far less tedious, than ours. Some of the really dull things European children have, for centuries, had to learn in school, the Egyptians made no use of at all: percentages, money conversions, the lowest common denominator, and so on. Because the ancient Egyptians were spared the Industrial Revolution, their children, as a result, was spared commercial arithmetic. Their arithmetic was certainly easier, but as far as fractions go, it was more precise than our. And by using this system, the Egyptians could carry out the most extraordinary calculations. For example, they could estimate how much food and drink, how many blocks of stone of different shapes and sizes, how many slaves and overseers would be needed from day to day to build the pyramids. In addition they could reckon the dates of completion of the various stages of the work, using the most rational calendar ever-invented (superior to the version we use). Calculations were essential to the running of the state as a tight, efficient system.

The Egyptians ideas of teaching arithmetic, resurfaced in 20-th century British schools, as ‘modern maths’, but failed to catch on, largely because of lack of analysis related to the age of the class involved.

As you know, hopefully, have understood the Egyptian "numbers" is not anything like what we’re used to. And instead of our numbers, they used symbols, which started at one, and went up as far as a million.

One was symbolised by a papyrus leaf, 10 was a tie made by bending a leaf, 100 was what looked like a piece of rope, 1000 was a lotus flower,

10,000 was a snake, 100,000 was a tadpole and 1,000,000 was a scribe raising both arms above his head as if in astonishment, like the symbols shown below:

1650 BC is the approximate date of the Rhind (or Ahmes) papyrus, a mathematical text in the form of a practical handbook. It contains eighty-five problems copied in hieratic writing by the scribe Ahmes from an earlier work. The papyrus was purchased in1858 in Egypt, by the Scottish Egyptologist A. Henry Rhind, and then later acquired by the British Museum. This and the Moscow papyrus are our chief sources of information concerning ancient Egyptian mathematics. The Rhind papyrus was published in 1927, and is about eighteen feet long and about thirteen inches high. When the papyrus arrived the British Museum, however, it was shorter and in two pieces, with a central portion missing. About four years later, the American Egyptologist Edwin Smith bought in Egypt what he thought was a medical papyrus. The Smith purchase was given to the New York Historical Society in 1932, where antiquarians discovered that it was a pasted-up deception, and that beneath the fraudulent covering lay the missing piece of the Ahmes papyrus. The Society accordingly gave the scroll to the British Museum, and therefor completing the entire Ahmes work.

The Rhind Papyrus is a rich primary source of ancient Egyptian mathematics. Describing the Egyptian methods of multiplying and dividing, the Egyptian use of unit fractions, their employment of false position, their solution of the problem of finding the area of a circle, and many applications of mathematics to practical problems.