Before Algebra Had a Name
Algebra was a word that used to scare the heck out of me as a child. I was always fairly competent with arithmetic and for the longest time I thought that’s all mathematics was about, because that’s all we seemed to do in school. Then as I got further into high school I began seeing letters appear in textbooks, instead of numbers. Well, that was it for me! I never ventured down that road, I got my C grade at GCSE and left maths for good.
Fast forward some decades and I’m raising two children who will come across algebra eventually. And I need to be ready to help guide them through and not run a mile from it, like baba their Dad did!
One thing that might’ve helped schoolboy me is having the knowledge that Africans were among the first to practice and record algebraic operations.
Long before Pythagoras. Plato or Aristotle, in the land of Kemet (modern day Egypt) in the Nile River Valley, scribes were writing and working through equations that involved unknown quantities, a fundamental concept of algebra.
One of the clearest examples comes from a document known as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, dating to around 1650 BCE (3,600 years ago). This papyrus contains dozens of problems that today we’d recognise as early algebra.
The “aha” and the Eye of Horus
Kemetic algebra looks unfdidn’t look like modern notation. Instead, scribes used terms like “aha”, meaning “quantity”, to represent unknown values. For example, one problem might say: A quantity and its seventh part together make 19. What is the quantity? This is essentially the equation x + x/7 = 19. The method used to solve it involved logical steps and mathematical structure.
This papyrus shows that In Kemet, mathematics was woven into daily life. Algebraic thinking was applied to architecture, agriculture, trade, and timekeeping.
A Legacy for Black Children
So algebra has deep African roots. For Black children, learning this history connects them to a long-standing tradition of intelligence, abstraction, and problem-solving.
Learn More
The Algebra of Ancient Egypt:
https://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/Ancient-Africa/mad_ancient_egypt_algebra.html
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