Think like an Egyptian
Think like an EgyptianWE THE CURIOUS vol.2 no.5
"There is nothing in this papyrus that would trouble your average GCSE student,and most of the stuff is rather less advanced than that," explains Neil MacGregor,the Director of the British Museum and narrator of "A History of the World in 100Objects." The format of the papyrus is, in fact, surprisingly similar to the sampleproblem sections in math textbooks today. There are a total of 84 problems, eachwith its own title, and each with a worked solution."In short," continues MacGregor, "the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus teaches you allyou need to know for a dazzling administrative career. It's a crammer for the CivilService exams around 1550 BC and, like self-help publications today that promiseinstant success, it has a wonderful title, written boldly in red on the front page: 'Thecorrect method of reckoning, for grasping the meaning of things, and knowingeverything -- obscurities and all secrets.' In other words: 'Buy me, and you can't gowrong.' "For aspiring ancient Egyptian scribes, such a scroll (it is the 17-feet in length)would have cost a small fortune, roughly the same as a goat. Even so, purchasingthe study aid was probably a good career move. As one contemporary scribe wrote,extolling the importance of mathematics for the ambitious administrator: "So thatyou may open treasuries and granaries, so that you may take delivery from onecorn-bearing ship at the entrance to the granary, so that on feast days you maymeasure out the gods' offerings."Ancient Egypt -- with its building works, its extensive taxes, its centralized foodstorage and payment systems -- was a large-scale operation. Detailed calculations
and records were necessary to keep things running, so ancient Egyptian scribesweren't counting on their fingers. They even had a hieroglyph for one million,which was a very large number back at the dawn of civilization. (Appropriatelyenough, it is a stylized picture of an astonished man -- a man with both armsraised.)Ancient Egyptians used a different hieroglyph -- a unique symbol -- for the powersof 10: 1,000,000 (the astonished man), 100,000 (the tadpole), 10,000 (the bentfinger), 1,000 (the lotus flower), 100 (the scroll), 10 (the heel bone), and 1 (thestick). Like many civilizations, including our own, they used a single vertical lineto symbolize the number 1. But notice how ancient Egyptians needed all thesedifferent symbols to represent 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000,whereas we can do the job with just two symbols: 1 and 0. That is the power of the"place values" that we use today. In the decimal system (a system for writingnumbers first invented in 7th century India) a 1 symbol in the ten's place -- i.e.,10 -- means something quite different than a 1 in the million's place.For us, because we have "place values," computation is always done with the same10 symbols (0, 1, 2, 3, ..., 8, 9). The beauty of this -- which we may haveunderappreciated in grade school -- is that, once you've memorized yourmultiplication tables up to 9 x 9, you can handle any multiplication problem, some just take longer and are more tedious than others. For example, we would approachthe multiplication problem 7 x 49 by breaking it into two easier multiplicationproblems: 7 x 9(in the one's place) + 7 x 4(in the ten's place) = 63 + 280 = 343.But an ancient Egyptian scribe couldn't see the problem that way; he couldn't think in terms of place values. Such a scribe, like the owner of the Rhind papyrus, wouldbe a clever young man, well educated, and part of a technically sophisticated
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Think like an Egyptian | WE THE CURIOUS vol.2 no.5
An ancient Egyptian scribe, like the owner of the Rhind papyrus, would be a clever young man, well educated, and part of a technically sophisticated society. But he couldn't multiply -- not as we multiply today.
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