Lahun Mathematical Papyri
mathematical subset of the Lahun Papyri
The Lahun Mathematical Papyri (also known as the Kahun Mathematical Papyri) is an ancient Egyptian mathematical text. It forms part of the Kahun Papyri, which was discovered at El-Lahun (also known as Lahun, Kahun or Il-Lahun) by Flinders Petrie during excavations of a workers' town near the pyramid of the Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh Sesostris II. The Kahun Papyri are a collection of texts including administrative texts, medical texts, veterinarian texts and six fragments devoted to mathematics.
Fragments
The mathematical texts most commented on are usually named:
Lahun IV.2 (or Kahun IV.2) (UC 32159): This fragment contains a table of Egyptian fraction representations of numbers of the form 2/n. A more complete version of this table of fractions is given in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus.
Lahun IV.3 (or Kahun IV.3) (UC 32160) contains numbers in arithmetical progression and a problem very similar to Problem 40 of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. Another problem on this fragment computes the volume of a cylindrical granary. In this problem the scribe uses a formula which takes measurements in cubits and computes the volume and expresses it in terms of the unit khar. Given the diameter (d) and height (h) of the cylindrical granary. As was common for ancient Egyptian mathematics, the scribe did not necessarily generalize the result for arbitrary values of the diameter (d) and height (h). Instead, results were typically obtained empirically —even in problems that involved equations, often solved through the Regula falsi method— rather than through formalized geometric reasoning.
“Lahun Mathematical Papyri” enters the record as mathematical subset of the Lahun Papyri. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lahun, Mathematical and Papyri can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7709191. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lahun Mathematical Papyri” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.