Dr. Cynthia Huffman of the Pittsburg State University Department of Mathematics and Physics traveled to Egypt and shared her experience with students, faculty, and community members on March 5 in Yates Hall.
Huffman teaches the History of Mathematics class at the university and has traveled to Egypt to learn more about how the Ancient Egyptians recorded and used numbers a few times now. Through her travels, she has amassed many photos from real Ancient Egyptian temples, pyramids, tombs, and other sites that all depict their ancient counting system.
With some help from several online groups and her own diligent research, she has even decoded some of the pieces to come to complete her research goal. Huffman says she “had a sabbatical to learn more.” After the trip, she read everything she could find about Egyptian history, and the more she read, the more she realized she did not know.
After that, she has taken advantage of her time to visit many museums around the world to collect photos for her classes, and has begun writing a new paper detailing the examples she found on her recent 2025 trip and the uses she saw that numbers were used for in ancient Egypt. According to her research, she found numbers were used for basic counting, measurement, and calendar.
She explained the basics for everyone in attendance about the number system to make it easier to spot the numbers in the photos. There were not many numbers per say, but the amounts each symbol stood for went all the way up to one million. Like many ancient cultures, a dash stood for the number one, but the other numbers were represented by other symbols.
A cattle hobble, which looks like an arch, stood for the number ten. After that, the coil of rope stood for a hundred, a water lily meant one thousand, the bent finger was ten thousand, a tadpole meant one hundred thousand, and the form of the Egyptian god of eternity stood for one million.
Since there were no numbers between each power of ten, you group them to form the number you want to portray and could be written right-to-left, left-to-right, or vertically. When you are reading them, you arrange from the highest value to the lowest and read them in the direction towards the faces nearest to them or in order of value high-to-low if no faces are present.
Through her research, she found that they also had a form of fractions, but only unit fractions. Unit fractions are when you have a one in the numerator to show you have one part of a whole, that whole being the number in the denominator. These were written with what is known as Gardiner sign D21. It typically stands for mouth but is used to mean part when in the context of being written over a line with a number inscribed beneath it.
Not only were there fractions, but there is what could be interpreted as an ancient spreadsheet. Dr. Huffman went to this particular ruin and got pictures of her own. Through her research and some help from other avid translators she was able to devise that the grid was divided into rows and columns with column headers and a title as well. The first part of the title has been lost due to age and the rock of the wall crumbling with time, but from the second part of the title it seemed to be offerings to a member of royalty, a deity, or a royal ancestor.