A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [47]
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.
The Rhind Papyrus teaches you all you need to know for a dazzling administrative career. It is effectively a crammer for the Egyptian civil service exams around 1550 BC. 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: ‘All the maths you need to know. Buy me, and you buy success.’
The numeracy of the Egyptians, honed by works like the Rhind Papyrus, was widely admired across the ancient world. Plato, for example, urged the Greeks to copy the Egyptians, for whom
The teachers, by applying the rules and practices of arithmetic to play, prepare their pupils for the tasks of marshalling and leading armies and organizing military expeditions and all together form them into persons more useful to themselves and to others and a great deal wider awake.
But if everybody agreed that training like this produced a formidable state machine, the question of what mathematics the Greeks actually did learn from the Egyptians remains a matter of debate. The problem is that we have only a very few surviving Egyptian mathematical documents – many others must have perished. So, although we have to assume that there was a flourishing higher mathematics, we just do not have the evidence for it. Professor Clive Rix, of the University of Leicester, emphasizes the significance of the Rhind Papyrus:
The traditional view has always been that the Greeks learnt their geometry from the Egyptians. Greek writers such as Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle all refer to the outstanding skills of the Egyptians in geometry.
If we didn’t have the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, we’d actually know very little indeed about how the Egyptians did mathematics. The algebra is entirely what we would call linear algebra, straight-line equations. There are some of what we call arithmetical progressions, which are a little bit more sophisticated. The geometry’s a very basic kind as well. Ahmose [the original copyist of the papyrus] tells us how to calculate the area of a circle, and how to calculate the area of a triangle. There is nothing in this papyrus that would trouble your average GCSE student, and most is rather less advanced than that.
But this is, of course, what you’d expect, because the person using the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus is not training to be a mathematician. He just needs to know enough to handle tricky practical problems – like how to divide up rations among workmen. If, for instance, you have 10 gallons of animal fat to get you through the year, how much can you consume every day? Dividing 10 by 365 was as tricky then as it is now, but it was essential if you were going to keep a workforce properly supplied and energized. Eleanor Robson, a specialist in ancient mathematics from Cambridge University, explains:
Everyone who was writing mathematics was doing it because they were learning how to be a literate, numerate manager, a bureaucrat, a scribe – and they were learning both the technical skills and how to manage numbers and weights and measures, in order to help palaces and temples manage their large economies. There must have been a whole lot of discussion of mathematics and how to solve the problems of managing huge building projects like the pyramids and the temples, and managing the huge workforces that went with it, and feeding them all.
How that more sophisticated