Ahmes the Scribe

Ahmes (Iah-mes, "He of the Moon") is the earliest practitioner of mathematics whose name has come down to us. He lived in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, in the years when the Hyksos kings of the Fifteenth Dynasty ruled the northern land from Avaris. Nothing is recorded of his birth, his family, or his home; what we know of him survives entirely in the words he himself set down.

His enduring work is the great scroll now called the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, which he copied in hieratic script in the thirty-third regnal year of the Hyksos king Apophis (Awserre), about 1550 BCE. With becoming humility, Ahmes did not claim the work as his own. He wrote that he was copying an older manuscript from the reign of Nimaatre — Amenemhat III of the Twelfth Dynasty — a source now lost, so that through his hand a mathematical tradition some three centuries older was carried forward.

The papyrus opens with the promise of "accurate reckoning for inquiring into things, and the knowledge of all things." Across its length Ahmes preserved practical arithmetic, unit fractions, the solving of equations, and the mensuration of fields, granaries, and pyramids — the working knowledge by which Egypt measured its world. Purchased at Thebes by Alexander Henry Rhind in 1858, the scroll now rests in the British Museum.

Though he called himself only a scribe, Ahmes gave the human story its oldest signed page of mathematics. We honor the patient hand that copied so that we might still count.