A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [48]
This loss of evidence makes it very hard to form a view of how Egypt stood in comparison with its neighbours and to understand exactly how representative Egyptian mathematics is around 1550 BC. Eleanor Robson tells us:
The only evidence from the same time we’ve got to compare it with is from Babylonia, in southern Iraq, because they were the only two civilizations at that point that actually used writing. I’m sure that lots of other cultures were counting and managing with numbers, but they all did it – as far as we know – without ever writing things down. The Babylonians we know a lot more about, because they wrote on clay tablets and, unlike papyrus, clay survives very well in the ground over thousands of years. So for Egyptian mathematics we have perhaps six, maximum ten, pieces of writing about mathematics, and the biggest of course is the Rhind Papyrus.
For me, the most remarkable thing about this papyrus is how close it lets us get to the quirky details of daily life under the pharaohs, not least the culinary aspects. From it we learn that if you force-feed a goose it needs five times as much grain as a free-range goose will eat. So did the Egyptians eat foie gras? Ancient Egypt also seems to have had battery-farming, because we’re told that geese kept in a coop – presumably unable to move – will need only a quarter of the food consumed by their free-range counterparts, and so would be much cheaper to fatten for market.
‘In seven houses there are seven cats …’
In between the beer and the bread, and the hypothetical foie gras, you can see the logistical infrastructure of an enduring and powerful state, able to mobilize vast human and economic resources for public works and military campaigns. The Egypt of the pharaohs was, to its contemporaries, a land of superlatives – astonishing visitors from all over the Middle East by the colossal scale of its buildings and sculptures, as it still does us today. Like all successful states, then as now, it needed people who could do the maths.
And if you’re still puzzling over the cats, and the mice, and the ears of grain in the puzzle that I began with, the answer is … 19,607.
18
Minoan Bull-leaper
Bronze statue of bull and acrobat, found in Crete, Greece
1700–1450 BC
A small bronze sculpture of a bull with a figure leaping over it is now one of the highlights of the British Museum’s Minoan collection. It comes from the Mediterranean island of Crete, where it was made around 3,700 years ago.
The bull and the leaper are both made of bronze, and together they’re about 5 centimetres (2 inches) long and between 10 and 13 centimetres (4 or 5 inches) high. The bull is in full gallop – legs outstretched and head raised – and the figure is leaping over it in a great arching somersault. It’s probably a young man. He’s seized the bull’s horns and thrown his body right over, so that we see him at the point where his body has completely flipped. The two arching figures echo each other – the outward curve of the boy’s body being answered by the inward curve of the bull’s spine. It’s a most dynamic and beautiful piece of sculpture, and it carries us at once into the reality – and, no less important, the myth – of the history of Crete.
The image is a literal representation of something that to most people today is just a metaphor – ‘taking the bull by the horns’ is what we’re all meant to do when confronted with the big moral problems of life. But archaeology suggests that about 4,000 years ago a whole civilization seems to have been collectively fascinated