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If in seven houses there are seven cats, if each cat catches seven mice, if each mouse

had eaten seven ears of corn and each ear of corn if sown would have produced seven gallons of grain.

How many things are mentioned in total? While you're counting I'll tell you that this is just one of nearly a hundred similar problems all complicated, all carefully written out with the answers

and showing the workings in best schoolbook manner that are recorded in the Rhined mathematical

papyrus, the most famous mathematical papyrus to have survived from ancient Egypt,

and the major source for our understanding of how the Egyptians thought about numbers.

Some of the maths is very, very practical.

Other problems are more abstract.

I think we see the beginnings of a realization that mathematics is not about specific numbers, about specific problems that you can

extract from general procedures, general rules that you can follow in lots of

cases. A history of the world in a hundred objects. the Rhine

the Rhined Mathematical Papyrus

around 3,000 years old, discovered in Thebes, Egypt.

It owes its name to an Aberdeen lawyer, Alexander Rhined, who in the 1850s took to wintering in Egypt because the dry heat helped his tuberculosis.

There, in Lux Luxor he bought this

prepyrus which turns out to be the largest mathematical text we know not just

from Egypt but from anywhere in the ancient world.

As it's extremely sensitive to humidity and to light,

we keep it here in the papyrus room,

which I'm just going to go into now.

It's pretty dry and pretty stuffy in here. In fact I imagine rather like the conditions in an ancient Egyptian tomb which suits the papyrus

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