Ancient Egyptian mathematics in the early 20th century: a mathematical view from Kiel, 1926

Abstract

In December 1926, the historian of mathematics Otto Neugebauer, then at the very beginning of his career, gave a seminar to mathematicians at the University of Kiel on the subject of ancient Egyptian fraction-reckoning. The content of Neugebauer's lecture was drawn from his doctoral dissertation, completed in Göttingen earlier that year, which had been inspired by the appearance in 1923 of a new edition of the most complete surviving source on ancient Egyptian mathematics, the so-called Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. This new edition, published by the Egyptologist Thomas Eric Peet, had served much more generally to revive interest in the subject of Egyptian mathematics, which was further explored by a small number of authors, including Peet and Neugebauer, throughout the rest of the 1920s. In their works, we see a range of approaches to the subject, from the cautiously context-sensitive style usually adopted by Egyptologists to the much more speculative mathematically-led methods of those scholars, such as Neugebauer, who came from strongly mathematical backgrounds. In this article, we present an annotated translation of Neugebauer's 1926 lecture and use it to paint a picture of differing attitudes towards the study of ancient mathematics.