The Recto of the RMP of the British Museum, now nearly 4,000 years old, occupies about one-third of the whole of the 1 8-foot roll, and is the most extensive of all the arithmetical tables to be found among the ancient Egyptian papyri. It is inscribed in hieratic characters, the cursive form of hieroglyphics, and normally reads from right to left. The table gives the values of 2 divided by the fifty odd numbers from 3 to 101, all expressed as the sums of unit fractions; for example, 2 -r7 is ' ?. Unit fractions have unity for numerators, which with the solitary exception of the fraction §, were the only fractions the Egyptians used, or ever could use, because of their notation. Thus the number 7 in hieratic was ^, and the same number with a stroke above it, >?, represented the fraction *. The Recto table was of great importance to the scribes, because of its frequent use in ordinary multiplication and division, comparable perhaps in modern days, with a full set of multiplication tables. But one asks, why always 2 divided by odd numbers? The reason is that in Egyptian multiplication and division, only the twice times table was used, by constant doubling, and by occasionally finding | of a fraction from their rule, (RMP 61 B), or their tables. It was the very useful circumstance, of which the scribes were aware, that the powers of 2, namely, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, . . . , will produce, by properly choosing and adding them, every possible integer, entirely uniquely. Thus to multiply 147 by 43, the scribe wrote 147, doubled it (147X2), doubled the answer (147x4), doubled again (147 X 8), and so on, so that the addition of the products for 147 X (1, 2, 8, 32), gives the product 147x43Now if the multiplicand contained unit fractions, then their constant doubling presented difficulties which the Recto table helped to solve. There was no need to include the doubling of even unit fractions in the Recto table, because, for example, ? x 2 is obviously ', but a second doubling would present ' x 2, or 2 divided by 9, which the table provides as (' ?), but not as (I I), since two equal unit fractions were never written together, except perhaps as part of a calculation. Division was much the same, because if the scribe wished to divide 147 by 43, he did it by finding out what 43 must be multiplied by, to obtain 147, which is multiplication again but often more difficult. Addition of the integral parts of the various multiple products was easy enough, but the addition of the various unit fractions was a different proposition.