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Eye Of Horus
The Eye of Horus
(originally, The Eye of Ra) is an ancient
Egyptian symbol of protection and power, from the deity
Horus or Ra
The Eye was a symbol
that signified royal power, yet on the numeration side
denoted a decimal system where round off was set to the
first 6-terms. The ancients believed this symbol of
indestructibility would assist in rebirth, due to their
beliefs about the soul. The more recent tradition of
freemasonry adopted the symbol in the form of the Eye of
Providence and as such it has survived to this day, and
appears as the Eye of Providence on the recto of the
Great Seal of the United States. The Eye of Horus
(flanked by Nekhbet and Wadjet) was found under the 12th
layer of bandages on Tutankhamun's mummy.
Horus was an ancient
god in Egyptian mythology who dramatically evolved over
the whole of Egyptian history. Early on, he became
identified as a sky god, where one of his eyes was the
sun, and the other the moon. His weaker eye later became
less important in his mythology, and he became more
strongly aligned with the sun, particularly when the
cult of Thoth, a moon god, arose. As the sun, or rather,
with his eye as the sun, his eye had a special meaning,
and became a symbol of power when combined with the
hieratic aspects of the subject. Originally, Ra
held this position, but as Horus gradually became more
important, he transformed into a sun god, so Horus
became thought of as Ra, or rather Ra-Herakhty
("Ra, who is Horus of the two horizons"). Later
Horus-Eye numeration decreased in importance in Egyptian
life, with hieratic, demotic and later improvements in
Egyptian arithmetic solving the oldest Horus-Eye
problem. The oldest Horus-Eye problem was to write any
number, like one (1), exactly, without throwing away any
piece of the number.
Mathematics
The
shattering of Horus' eye into six pieces
lead the Egyptians to use the Eye of
Horus to calculate fractions within a
decimal (fraction) numeration system.
The ancient Egyptians used these six
pieces to represent the six senses and
each piece had a fractional value and
were aware that a round off process was
taking place, throwing out a piece of
almost any number. The parts of the eye
were divided as follows:
-
The right side of the eye = 1/2 =
smell
-
The pupil = 1/4 = sight
-
The eyebrow = 1/8 = thought
-
The left side of the eye = 1/16 =
hearing
-
The curved tail = 1/32 = taste
-
The leg = 1/64 = touch
The
Egyptians could do fractions by
quantitatively adding up parts, and
later learned to write any vulgar
fraction as first a Horus-Eye (quotient)
and second an Egyptian fraction series
as its remainder. If one were to do the
math they would discover that the
fractions, when added together, only
equal 63/64, and thus, 1/64 had been
thrown away This has been attributed to
the ancient Egyptians belief in not
being able to attain perfection but also
the idea that the 1/64 that remains
could be a form of magic that one would
require to complete themselves. The
Akhmim (Cairo) Wooden Tablet, written in
2,000 BCE, formally solved this problem
by dividing a hekat unity, 64/64, by any
number 3, 7, 10, 11 and 13, with the
quotient being stated as Q/64 and its
remainder as (5*R/n) times 1/320 (named
ro). Generally, divisor n could reach
but not exceed 64. When a divisor
greater than 64 was needed, as the
medical texts, P. Eber and others often
required, another exact partitioning
method of the volume measurement unit
was implemented.
Source is
www.wikipedia.org
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