Egyptian Mathematics

TERMS/SYMBOLS HIGHLIGHTS/DEFINITION/EQUIVALENTS

Ancient Egypt an autocratic society ruled a line of Pharaohs, who were thought to be divine.
By 3000 BC two earlier nations had joined to form a single Egyptian nation
under a single ruler.
Agriculture had been developed making heavy use of the regular wet and dry
periods of the year.
Semitic language, was written in two forms, Hieroglyphic and Hieratic.
Hieroglyphic Hieroglyphs are little pictures representing words.
The Egyptians had a base 10 system of hieroglyphs for numerals.
Hieratic script a cursive writing system used in the provenance of the pharaohs in
Egypt and Nubia.
It was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, allowing scribes to
write quickly without resorting to the time-consuming hieroglyphs
Great Pyramid Has a base of 230.4 meters (755.9 feet) and an estimated original height of
146.5 meters (480.6 feet).
This also creates a height to base ratio of 0.636, which indicates it is indeed a
Golden Triangles.
Thales devoted his life in calculating the heights of pyramids.
Rhind named for A.H.Rhind (1833-1863) who purchased it at Luxor in 1858.
Mathematical It is 18 feet long and13 inches wide. It is also called the Ahmes Papyrus after
Papyrus the scribe that last copied it.
Moscow purchased by V. S. Golenishchev (d. 1947). Origin: 1700 BC.
Mathematical It is 15 ft long and 3 inches wide. The oldest mathematical text discovered,
Papyrus which is an Egyptian Middle Kingdom papyrus dated c. 2000 1800 BC.
Berlin Papyrus Written in the 1900 BCE era. An Egyptian Middle Kingdom scribe left the hieratic
papyrus at Saqqara, Egypt.
Shows that ancient Egyptians could solve a second order algebraic equation.
ONE
The symbol for one may come from a finger.
 TEN
The symbol for ten is a piece of rope.
One Hundred
This symbol is a coil of rope.
One Thousand
It shows the leaf, stem and root, but not the flower.
Ten Thousand
Perhaps it is a finger ten thousand times as big as the symbol for one.
One Hundred Thousand
The symbol for hundred thousand is a frog, sometimes as a tadpole.
One Million
The symbol for one million is a god called Heh. It also means just a very large
number, like squillion.
The Eye of Horus The Eye of Horus is an iconic symbol often associated with Ancient Egypt and its
mathematics.
The name comes from the Egyptian God of mathematics, Horus.
It represents the basis of Egyptian mathematics- the unit fractions.
It also symbolizes the ancient mathematical concept of infinity.