It's kinda like "always wear clean underwear", but related to math, and posterity...Akhmim Wooden TabletThe Akhmim wooden tablet, often called the Cairo wooden tablet, is a document dating to 2000 BC, near the beginning of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. It is housed in the Egypt Museum in Cairo... The student scribe was then asked to prove his/her division by multiplying by 3, 7, 10, 11, 13, as required, to find the complete 1/64th unit. Since the student compiling this tablet made many arithmetic errors in the duplication arithmetic, even a 2002 translation of the document did not fully recognize the exact nature of all the division operations. The Rhind papyrus also contains one of these problems, division by 3, leading to confusion by Gillings (1972) and others. The importance of the tablet is that the system of Egyptian fractions may have originated in trying to divide the smallest grain units or some other units in ancient Egyptian history.l
Eric W. Weisstein et al
contributed by Milo Gardner
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If doing math in hieroglyphics is anything like writing, I can understand why that student found it so tough. The only subject that would have been easier, IMHO, would have been art--if you can draw you can write! Egyptian teachers didn't make it any easier, either; their favorite saying was, "A boy's ears are on his back."
Sometimes I think the real reason why schools used to concentrate on the 3 "R"s is because by the time they got done teaching that, you were almost grown up and there wasn't much time left for anything else!
many thanks for this article...it is great news and you are right, we wouldn't want to climb that family tree!