The plant itself - a kind of reed that can grow to about 15 feet (or 4.5m) high - was plentiful in the Nile Delta. Making papyrus is laborious but in fact, quite straightforward. The papyrus is about a foot (or 30cm) high, and if you look closely you can see the fibres of the papyrus plant. It's simply framed under glass to protect it. Today it's in three pieces - the two largest ones in the British Museum. The whole papyrus would originally have been about 17 feet (or 5m) long and would normally have been rolled up in a scroll. It's pretty dry and pretty stuffy in here, in fact I imagine rather like the conditions in an Ancient Egyptian tomb, which suits the papyrus - above all because of course it's dark, and therefore the writing doesn't fade. There, in Luxor, he bought this papyrus, which turns out to be the largest mathematical text we know, not just from Egypt but from anywhere in the ancient world.Īs it is extremely sensitive to humidity and to light, we keep it here in the British Museum, in the Papyrus Room, which I am just going to go into now. It owes its name to an Aberdeen lawyer, Alexander Rhind, who in the 1850s took to wintering in Egypt because the dry heat helped his tuberculosis. "I think we see the beginnings of a realisation that mathematics is not about specific numbers, about specific problems that you can extract from it general procedures, general rules, that you can follow in lots of cases." (Clive Rix) "Some of the maths is very very practical, other problems are more abstract." (Eleanor Robson) While you're counting, I'll tell you that this is just one of nearly a hundred similar problems, all equally complicated, all carefully written out, with the answers, and showing the workings in best schoolbook manner, that are recorded in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus - the most famous mathematical papyrus to have survived from Ancient Egypt, and the major source for our understanding of how the Egyptians thought about numbers.
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