01 / ANTIQUITY TO THE RENAISSANCE

Ahmes (Ahmose)

c. 1650 BCE·Egypt

How do you share something equally? For Egyptian scribes, fractions made counting useful for food, land, and everyday work.

The person behind the ideas

A scribe working in Egypt around 1650 BCE; the papyrus’s precise date is debated.
Copied mathematical material from an older text, rather than claiming to invent it.
Preserved worked problems about fractions, areas, and volumes.

01 / UNIT FRACTIONS

The Rhind papyrus opens with problems like this one: share some loaves fairly among some people.

Egyptian scribes wrote each share with unit fractions: pieces with a 1 on top, like 1/2 or 1/6, each used once.

Cut the loaves and hand out the pieces. Everyone must end up with exactly the same amount.

Problem:

Each person’s fair share

Loaves2

People3

Loaf per person

THE IDEADifferent cuts, the same amount: 2/3 of a loaf is exactly 1/2 + 1/6. A fraction is an amount, and there is more than one way to build it.

The papyrus includes rules for areas and granary volumes: mathematics used to measure real things.

Its worked examples let us see how Egyptian scribes calculated thousands of years ago.