Eye of Horus and unit fractions in ancient Egypt

 Reading source:

https://www.recoveredscience.com/const102horuseye.htm

 

What was interesting in my research was the strong between Egyptian Mythology and the idea of fractions. It seems that symbols were taken apart from the complete Eye of the Horus and each one of them was given the meaning by dividing by 2. The intriguing part is that the fractions add up to 1-1/64, which suggests that the symbols do not add up to 1, which suggests that it might not be complete when you put it back altogether. There are likely some reason in Egyptian Mythology that might give a explanation about that. It is clear that they likely obtained these fractions by continued division of 2, which yields the interesting question: why did they stop at 1/64 and not continue? Did they realize that they wouldn't get the sum 1 unless it is an infinite series?


Coming off the top of my mind, I think Chinese has some interesting meanings for numbers as well. For example, the number 4 sounds like the word death, and most buildings skip 4 in naming floors or houses. The same carries on for 14 and other similar names. The number 8 sounds like getting rich, so people prefer numbers ending in 8 or multiple 8s. The number 7 is somewhat unlucky, which might be connected to how it is a prime and doesn't really have nice division rules. After a funeral the family would meet up and order 7 dishes to signify the end of such an event and move on. No other time would people eat 7 dishes or have 7 pieces of something in a plate.

Comments

  1. Amanda21 October 2020 at 10:29

    Ian, you have some interesting questions and I encourage you to continue your research. Thank you for sharing your knowledge of lucky and unlucky numbers.

    ReplyDelete

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