Hieroglyphics and Egyptian Mathematics

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The Egyptians method of writing was known as ‘hieroglyphics’. Hieroglyphics contained about 750 different signs representing animals, plants, people or objects. It was completely based on pictures with no letters. The last time it was used was just before 400 AD by priests. When they died, so did hieroglyphics and experts are still trying to decode it.

For so long, scientists thought that the pictures stood for what they look like, for example, a picture of a pot meant a pot. Now they know this is not the case and the pictures only act as symbols for other words, syllables and letters. Scientists were then able to try and decode some of the symbols through other methods and learnt that objects could represent letters, such as a picture of an owl meaning the letter "M".

When hieroglyphics were first used to communicate, pictures did indeed represent what the objects they looked like. Early Egyptians used pictures to make lists, for example, they would show a cow, and then the number. They found that this didn't give enough information and that they had no way of writing the names so 24 ‘sound signs’ were made. One sound stood for one sign however, sentences became too long and so diffent sounds were put together just to make sound groups just as we have in the English language. This led to hundreds of different signs, with some signs meaning more than one thing. The Egyptians would put a picture of the object at the end of the sentence to specify exactly what they meant.

Numbers
Writing 99 was quite slow because unlike our system there were only 7 digits in the Egyptians numbers. Also, they had no zero, division, or multiplication so writing 4 x 3 meant writing 4 + 4 + 4.
They also used fractions, but only using 1 for the numerator so to get 4/5, they would write - 1/5 + 1/5 + 1/5 + 1/5

Calendars
The Civil Calendar:
Just like our calendar they divided it into 12 months and in each month there were 3 ten day weeks (30 days just like ours). There were 3 seasons and each season was made up of 4 months. The calendar year also included 5 holy festival days at the end of each year.

Because the civil calendar did not allow for leap years, it became more and more out of time each year. This upset the farmers' calendars, as at the same time every year they were eclipsed by the sun for 70 days and then the star Sothis would appear again. This would be mean the start of the Nile flood and farmers' needed to know when this would happen in order to plan their harvest.

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