Your Egypt

[kamar]

Did the Ancient Egyptians possess an ingenious skill for calculation? Assem Deif* works out an ancient problem.

The Greeks developed mathematics as a deductive science that reached its climax with Euclid of Alexandria in his masterpiece The Elements. Before that, during the ancient Egyptian era, mathematics was an inductive discipline of a utilitarian nature used to perform practical tasks such as flood control or land measurement using rope. It has been suggested that mathematics then amounted to no more than the two-times table and the ability to find two-thirds of any number. The whole structure of Egyptian mathematics was said to be based on these two simple rules, and indeed no evidence exists of a textual geometry with constructions and proofs.

Yet, looking at the Egyptians' stunning monuments, as well as a civilisation that spanned three millennia, one might expect to find a similar element of grandeur in their sciences -- especially in mathematics and astronomy. How did they configure the manpower and materials needed to build more than 90 pyramids? It is obvious that to calculate the vast amount of computations they needed, the ancient Egyptians reached a fairly advanced mathematical knowledge.

Several eminent Greek mathematicians -- Pythagoras, Thales and Archimedes, to name just a few -- worked in Egypt, and it is likely that Egyptian mathematics was absorbed into the body of Greek mathematics. The Giza pyramids offer definitive evidence of the ancient accuracy of measuring. Built in the middle of the third millennium BC, shortly after the first known evidence of Egyptian writing, they predate by 600 years any early mathematical tools. The Great Pyramid of Khufu was built of 2,300,000 limestone blocks each averaging 2.5 tons. Simple calculations reveal that, since it took 20 years to complete, and assuming that work lasted eight hours per day, it was possible to fit 2,300,000/20 x 365 x 8 x 60 = 0.7 blocks per minute. In other words it took about 10 minutes to fit seven such huge blocks neatly into place at such an elevation. This does not account for the time taken to construct or demolish the ramp using to pull up the stones.


Continue to read here :

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/829/hr1.htm