Egyptian Mathematics

Abstract

PROF. FEET'S beautiful book is written for the Egyptologist and the mathematician, but not only for them. It is also for the man in the street- in such a street as runs through any university town; for the Rhind papyrus is one of the ancient monuments of learning. The famous scroll was bought in Luxor in 1858 by a Scottish lawyer and antiquary, from whose keeping it passed into that of the British Museum. There, in 1867, Lenormant examined it and referred it to the Xllth dynasty; Birch, and Brugsch the lexicographer, again examined and in part described it; and Eisenlohr (a colleague of Moritz Cantor's in Heidelberg) published a full and useful description,¹ based on facsimiles lent by the Museum——“a courtesy which he repaid by publishing a tracing of them without authority.” The Museum issued an almost perfect facsimile in 1898, with an introduction by Sir E. A. W. Budge (cf. NATURE, vol. 59, p. 73); and at various times the papyrus has been studied by many scholars, by Hultsch, Cantor, and Lepsius, Griffiths and Rodet, Favaro, Gino Loria and others. Prof. Peet is a born Egyptologist; he has made himself a mathematician; he has “combined his information.” His labours crown the exhaustive investigation of the papyrus, and he gives us its whole story in the most attractive and most readable form; he might have given us, perhaps, a fuller bibliography.

The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus: British Museum 10057 and 10058.

Introduction, Transcription, Translation, and Commentary by Prof. T. Eric Peet. Pp. + 136 + 24 plates. (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, Ltd.; London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., 1923.) 63s. net.