ABSTRACT
Traditionally, writings on ancient Egyptian mathematics have appeared as a prologue to the true start of the history of mathematics: the Greeks. Linear narrative writing and the perceived debt to the Greeks have ensured that in the majority of histories the Egyptians are hardly mentioned, if at all. Writers about the topic tend to be historians of mathematics, not Egyptologists. Their goal is to trace the origins of mathematical thought and to place different cultures in a timeline. It is even rarer to find reference to mathematical texts in works on the ancient Egyptian culture and their achievements than it is to find themmentioned in histories of mathematics. The overall impression is summarised by the Egyptologist Barry Kemp and the historian of mathematics Otto Neugebauer:
Practised scribes must have developed a degree of mathematical intuition, but the idea of pursuing this as an end in itself – to create the subject of mathematics – did not occur to them.
