Think like an Egyptian

Think like an Egyptian

WE 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 100
Objects." The format of the papyrus is, in fact, surprisingly similar to the sample
problem sections in math textbooks today. There are a total of 84 problems, each
with its own title, and each with a worked solution.

"In short," continues MacGregor, "the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus teaches you all
you need to know for a dazzling administrative career. It's a crammer for the Civil
Service exams around 1550 BC and, like self-help publications today that promise
instant success, it has a wonderful title, written boldly in red on the front page: 'The
correct method of reckoning, for grasping the meaning of things, and knowing
everything -- obscurities and all secrets.' In other words: 'Buy me, and you can't go
wrong.' "

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, purchasing
the study aid was probably a good career move. As one contemporary scribe wrote,
extolling the importance of mathematics for the ambitious administrator: "So that
you may open treasuries and granaries, so that you may take delivery from one
corn-bearing ship at the entrance to the granary, so that on feast days you may
measure out the gods' offerings."

Ancient Egypt -- with its building works, its extensive taxes, its centralized food
storage and payment systems -- was a large-scale operation. Detailed calculations
and records were necessary to keep things running, so ancient Egyptian scribes
weren'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. (Appropriately
enough, it is a stylized picture of an astonished man -- a man with both arms
raised.)

Ancient Egyptians used a different hieroglyph -- a unique symbol -- for the powers
of 10: 1,000,000 (the astonished man), 100,000 (the tadpole), 10,000 (the bent
finger), 1,000 (the lotus flower), 100 (the scroll), 10 (the heel bone), and 1 (the
stick). Like many civilizations, including our own, they used a single vertical line
to symbolize the number 1. But notice how ancient Egyptians needed all these
different 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 writing
numbers 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 same
10 symbols (0, 1, 2, 3, ..., 8, 9). The beauty of this -- which we may have
underappreciated in grade school -- is that, once you've memorized your
multiplication 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 approach
the multiplication problem 7 x 49 by breaking it into two easier multiplication
problems: 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, would
be a clever young man, well educated, and part of a technically sophisticated
society. But he couldn't multiply as we do because place values had not been
invented yet. So what would he do? How would he multiply the seven stick
hieroglyphs (7) by the four heal bone hieroglyphs with nine more stick hieroglyphs
(49)?

It's rather startling, but when we try to multiply hieroglyphs without recourse to
our automatic approach (i.e., the "this"-times-"that"-carry-the-"something"
method), we have to fall back on a more elementary understanding of
multiplication -- and you may discover that you don't have such an understanding
to fall back on. Most adults today are somewhat out of touch with what
multiplication is. That is not to say that they don't know how to do it, just that they
don't really know what it is they are doing.

For instance, can we imagine multiplication without times tables? The Rhind
papyrus has several mathematical tables that, if memorized, would have increased
the speed of common calculations, but no times tables. They didn't rely on times
tables, as we do, because they couldn't approach harder multiplication problems,
such as 7 x 49, by breaking it down into "times-tables" multiplication facts: 7 x
9(in the one's place) + 7 x 4(in the ten's place). Instead, they had to find ways to
turn harder multiplication problems into easier "doubling" multiplication problems.

One of the many practice problems on Rhind Papyrus is word problem designed to
test a scribe's basic multiplication skills. By approaching the problem as an
Egyptian would have in 1550 BCE (that's over a thousand years before the time of
Plato, and two thousand years before the fall of Rome), we can create a real
connection to those ambitious young scribes who lived -- and sought career
advancement through numeracy -- so long ago. Absorbed in the mental calculation,
as they would have been absorbed, we can actually think like an Egyptian -- and, in
the process, rethink a part of our world we take for granted.

Click here for my flash video demonstration of how to multiply -- and think -- like
an Egyptian.

COMING UP THIS MONTH

Donald Duck's digits

REFERENCES
A History of the World in 100 Objects by BBC Radio & The British Museum

The Saga of Mathematics: A Brief History by Marty Lewinter and William

Widulski

Zero to Infinity: A History of Numbers by Edward B. Burger

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By Mackenzie Hawkins

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