[HM] Classical Egyptians

Luke Hodgkin (luke.hodgkin@kcl.ac.uk)
Fri, 1 Jan 1999 11:47:46 +0000

I wonder if any of you people can help me find out more about the following
(in some sense) old problem:
It's well known that classical Greeks felt that they owed a great deal to
their contemporaries in Egypt, mathematically. Herodotus, of course, plenty
of passages in Plato, Aristotle and that story about Democritus and the
'rope-stretchers'... The passage in Plato's Laws is particularly
interesting, I think. On the other hand, the 'authorities' on ancient
mathematics which I've read say this must have been exaggeration, or
propaganda, because what material we have from the Egyptians is at a much
lower level than anything the classical Greeks did, even at a quite early
stage.
Problems seem to me that the evidence from Egypt which I've seen cited is
either much earlier (New Kingdom) or later (after the Greek occupation), so
not immediately relevant to the period in question; (b) that it's
notoriously fragmentary, because of the chance way in which papyrus
documents survive anyway. So we have something of an argumentum a silentio
- if there were any interesting Egyptian mathematics, we'd have found it,
but we haven't. In a way it's the best argument I know of, but I'm very
ignorant on the subject. Is there any *Egyptian* material on Egyptian
mathematics in the 4th-6th centuries BCE, and how good is it? How much
room do we have, given the gaps in our sources, for imaginative speculation
about what was going on based on what Plato et al said?
(You can probably see the way this question is tending from the last
sentence, but I am really after 'facts' or wie es eigentlich bewesen...)
Luke Hodgkin