Ancient Science · Part 2 · Before the Greeks · B1
Egyptian Mathematics and Medicine: The Rhind and Edwin Smith Papyri
Part 2 of Ancient Science: long before Euclid, Egyptian scribes measured fields, shared out bread and treated broken bones, and two of their books survived in the dry sand. Sophia shows how the scribes calculated with fractions and how Egyptian doctors examined their patients, and asks how much the admiring Greeks really knew. If you examine…, you should… and if you double…, you get…, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight we leave the Museum and go back two thousand years, to the scribes of Egypt. Long before Euclid, they were measuring fields, dividing bread and treating broken bones.
My grandmother says the Greeks learned everything from Egypt.
The Greeks said so too. Herodotus says that geometry began here, when the Nile flooded and the fields had to be measured again. Whether that is true is another question.
How can we know what scribes did two thousand years ago?
Because two of their books survived in the dry sand, and they are full of instructions. Let me show you.
Egyptian scribes learned mathematics as a practical skill. They counted in tens, like us, but they wrote fractions in a special way: almost every fraction was a sum of unit fractions, fractions with 1 on top, like ½, ⅓ or ¼. Instead of ¾, a scribe wrote ½ + ¼. Only ⅔ had its own sign.
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