Heidelberg University Publishing

Abstract The project “Dissemination of Mathematical Knowledge and Skills in Late Antique Egypt” focuses on mathematical education of ‘practitioners’—a wide range of people for whom computational and metrological skills were part of their daily life and work in late antique Egypt. Its core is formed by an edition of several Greek papyrus codices and fragments thereof which contain collections of mathematical problems, metrological texts and arithmetical tables (see, for example, Fig. 1). All dating to the 4th through 5th centuries, these codices reflect a practice of purposeful collecting, selecting and copying of mathematical and metrological texts, which circulated earlier usually in the form of rolls and likely also transmitted orally in a variety of contexts. Editing texts of practical mathematics preserved in papyri is challenging for a variety of reasons. As usual for texts found in excavations, most are preserved only fragmentarily. But an even bigger difficulty lies in the concise style of mathematical texts in papyri. A large part of education in antiquity in general and of mathematical education in particular took place orally. Consequently, problems and their solutions recorded in papyrus codices were meant to supply just enough information for the reader to be able to expound orally both the problem and the procedures used to solve it. As a result, these texts omit words, use incomplete sentences, lack syntactic coordination, leave out information or logical steps that may have seemed obvious to their composers or copyists, and employ multiple and varying abbreviations. Moreover, collections of problems were produced by and for practitioners who had limited access to basic education. This means that writers of these codices were easily prone to making mistakes of various kinds, such as in spelling, calculation, misunderstanding of copied text or diagrams, and misuse of terms. How these mistakes are treated in an edition presents a further challenge in dealing with mathematical texts. Finally, there is the challenge of not converting mathematics of the papyri to the language of modern algebraic notation, a common anachronistic approach that might make the problems easier for a modern reader to follow, but at the price of failing to understand ancients’ perception of the problems and their methods to solve them.

Keywords late antiquity; critical edition; Greek Papyrus codices; History of Science and Education; mathematical problems