Last week, we discussed the great knowledge the Ancient Egyptians had as early as 5000 years ago. Today, there are six mathematical and scientific papyri in existence to support this.
The Reisner papyrus is in a museum in Boston; the Rhind mathematical papyrus, the Egyptian mathematical leather roll and the Kahnn papyrus in a museum in London, the Moscow mathematical papyrus in Moscow; and finally, the Berlin papyrus in Berlin.
The most famous one is the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (RMP) in the British museum. It’s about 5m long with writing on both sides, containing a mathematical table and 87 mathematical and geometrical problems. This papyrus was bought by a British tourist called Rhind in Luxor in 1859 and named after him. It was translated by Arnold Chase in 1927.
The papyrus was originally written about 1600 BC in the second intermediate period, yet it mentions that it was copied from another one 400 years older. These papyri have helped scientists appreciate the great knowledge of the Egyptians at that time. “I venture to suggest that if one were to ask for that single attribute of the human intellect which would most clearly indicate the degree of civilization of a race, the answer would be, the power of close reasoning, and that power could best be determined in a general way by the mathematical skill which members of the race displayed. Judged by this standard, the Egyptians of the nineteenth century before Christ had a high degree of civilization,” commented Chance. Richard Gillings, the author of the famous book Mathematics at the Time of the Pharaohs stated: “The brain power needed to build the Pyramids is in no way inferior to that needed for the great engineering of the present days. The Egyptians had attained all the essentials of a civilization as fully developed as our own as early as 3000 BC.”
No wonder one of the scientists on the Napoleonic Expedition, Francois Jomard, wrote “Builders of the Pyramids had the necessary know how to measure a geographical degree and thus the true circumference of the Earth, and had developed an advanced science of geography and geodesy which they had immortalized in the geometry of the Great Pyramid”.
“The Great Pyramid is a triumph of skill. Its errors both in length and in angles could be covered by placing one’s thumb on them. The Great Pyramid was so precisely aligned with cardinal points of the compass that it surpasses in accuracy any human construction up to date,” Sir William Flinders Petrie, the great Egyptologist, stressed. Next week, we’ll take a closer look at the Rhind mathematical papyrus.
