Introduction

For many centuries, ancient Egypt was seen as the source of wisdom and knowledge, about mathematics as well as other things. There was a long classical Greek tradition to this effect, and in later centuries the indecipherability of the hieroglyphs did nothing to dispel this belief. But since the early nineteenth century, when the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone by Young and Champollion enabled rapid progress to be made in translating extant Egyptian texts, the picture has changed to reveal a civilisation more pragmatic and down-to-earth. In this course, we shall investigate what we now know of Egyptian mathematics, and how we know it.

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 2 study in Mathematics