But, indeed, practical knowledge was, as has been said over and
over, the essential characteristic of Egyptian science. Yet
another illustration of this is furnished us if we turn to the
more abstract departments of thought and inquire what were the
Egyptian attempts in such a field as mathematics. The answer does
not tend greatly to increase our admiration for the Egyptian
mind. We are led to see, indeed, that the Egyptian merchant was
able to perform all the computations necessary to his craft, but
we are forced to conclude that the knowledge of numbers scarcely
extended beyond this, and that even here the methods of reckoning
were tedious and cumbersome. Our knowledge of the subject rests
largely upon the so- called papyrus Rhind,[10] which is a sort of
mythological hand-book of the ancient Egyptians. Analyzing this
document, Professor Erman concludes that the knowledge of the
Egyptians was adequate to all practical requirements. Their
mathematics taught them "how in the exchange of bread for beer
the respective value was to be determined when converted into a
quantity of corn; how to reckon the size of a field; how to
determine how a given quantity of corn would go into a granary of
a certain size," and like every-day problems. Yet they were
obliged to make some of their simple computations in a very
roundabout way. It would appear, for example, that their mental
arithmetic did not enable them to multiply by a number larger
than two, and that they did not reach a clear conception of
complex fractional numbers. They did, indeed, recognize that each
part of an object divided into 10 pieces became 1/10 of that
object; they even grasped the idea of 2/3 this being a conception
easily visualized; but they apparently did not visualize such a
conception as 3/10 except in the crude form of 1/10 plus 1/10