Smart informatics & Egyptology: A modern inter-disciplinary forum studying an ancient culture of pre- & proto-scientific logistics & intelligence

Abstract

Ancient Egyptian civilization is usually mentioned as a theocratic and particularly religious system of society that managed to unite Upper and Lower Egypt since c. 3200 BC, presenting several artistic and cultural developments. Not only the pyramids per se, but also the ancient Egyptian funerary texts offer modern Egyptologists a glimpse of the deep religious feeling and the use of allegories and metaphors as virtual vehicles for the expression of significant philosophical and proto-scientific truths. The Logistics of the ancient pyramid-builders were particularly well organized and current research has shown that they had done everything with a remarkable precision, using simple machines and their own intelligent minds and their perfectly organized hierarchical society. Their Mathematics and computational methods, on the other hand, clearly prove that they were calculating using virtually the way modern computers calculate, based on the binary system, although their Arithmetic was rooted on a decimal numerical system. This last is also attested by the fact that the fractions used by them were (almost 99%) only unitary, exactly as modern computers are doing. In this paper we shall endeavour to present and critically discuss the following: 1. A brief review and introduction to the interdisciplinary domain of informatization in Egyptology; 2. An overview of the ancient Egyptian mathematical and computational forma mentis. In the first instance we shall present the principal developments of the fruitful co-existence and collaboration of Informatics and Egyptology for the last 50 years, putting emphasis on the outstanding work of Emeritus Prof. Dr Dirk van der Pias (Holland) and his team [CCER, in the digitization of important ancient Egyptian texts, like e. g.: the Coffin Texts, as well as in the evolution of the best hieroglyphic-editor software ever conceived (WinGlyph v. 2)]. In the second instance, we shall briefly discuss the basics of ancient Egyptian Mathematics, their computational pre-or even proto-scientific techniques and the simple operations, showing that the ancient Egyptian mind and culture was indeed very advanced and from a certain point of view, constituting the precursor for the developments of modern Science.