facts about Science in Ancient Egypt

The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians made an important amount of knowledge in the fields of astronomy, engineering, mathematics and medicine, and some of their findings are still being adopted today. The Egyptians excelled in engineering, surgery, and created the solar calendar, which is considered a great scientific achievement, and the best cultural legacy that ancient Egypt provided to the civilized world.

Astronomy and calendar

The societies that lived in the ancient Near East (Egypt and Mesopotamia in particular) made a great effort to come up with a proper timing system that would allow organizing economic and political affairs. Since ancient times, the Babylonians divided the week into seven days, and astronomy into a Zodiacal Circle (an imaginary belt in the sky that includes the paths of the sun, moon and stars). The zodiac with its twelve signs, each divided into 30 degrees, served as an instrument for monitoring the movement of the sun, moon and planets. 

The Babylonians observed celestial bodies and were able to find out the functioning of stars and planets, and the best they discovered in this field was precisely tuning and observing lunar eclipses. Babylonian Meteorology is one of the oldest scientific observations recorded by peoples, and Europe benefited from it later. The ancient Egyptians initially followed what the Babylonians did by using the moon to divide the year into sections, but the Egyptians took a second step forward when they divided the year into three seasons: the flood season (from mid-July to mid-November), the sowing, germination and emergence season (from mid-November to mid-March), and then the harvest and drought season (from mid-March to mid-July). 

The duration of each semester was four months. They made each of these months composed of thirty days, and added five days at the end of the year, which they considered a period of holidays and holidays in order to match the calculation of the year with the flooding of the Nile and the positions of the sun. Tracking the positions of the planets and recording their observations for centuries in a row, the Egyptian priests managed to create the annual calendar in prehistoric times, namely at the last stage of these eras. This remarkable scientific achievement later became the best cultural legacy, and the greatest that ancient Egypt bequeathed to the civilized world. And the priests considered that their astronomical studies conducted by them should remain a secret science. 

The Egyptians noticed the appearance of some objects in their sky at a time when the waters of the Nile are rising and overflowing on its sides. The appearance of the star known as the"star of Yemeni poetry" had a special significance for them, as they linked the phenomenon of the proximity of the Nile flood in the summer of each year, and the appearance of this star on the eastern horizon before sunrise on a certain day of the year, so the emergence of the star indicated to them the coming of the flood. By repeating their observations, they were able to calculate the period it takes for it to appear in this way and found that it is 365 days. Thus, the ancient Egyptians invented the annual calendar based on the full cycle of the sun. The best ancient calendar, based on some science and responding to urgent needs, arose in Egypt, especially in the field of Agriculture.

Year 2000 BC.M. Approximately, the duration of the year for the ancient Egyptians was 365 days instead of 365 days and a quarter of a day (the actual time of the solar year). Thus, the ancient Egyptian calendar differed from the real estimate by a quarter of a day (six hours), and this difference becomes a full day every four years and a month every 120 years, until the appearance of the star of the Yemeni poetry coincides with the beginning of the year, and this happens every 1460 years. Julius Caesar introduced the Egyptian annual calendar to Rome and ordered to correct this error, the Greek astronomers of Alexandria corrected it in the year 46 BC.M. Then Pope Gregory XIII amended and improved it in 1582, and the Western world still adopts this calendar today.

The second astronomical contribution made by the ancient Egyptians was the division of day and night into twelve divisions according to the twelve months. They divided the day into: night and twelve hours, and day and twelve hours, a division that is still adopted to this day. Also, they created a set of various machines for determining time clocks.

Astrology 

The observation of the ancient Near Eastern peoples of the stars and planets and tracking their positions led to the genesis of astrology (knowledge of the unseen). Astrologers speculated about what would happen in the future of Man and what was written to him, and claimed to know what was destined for him by drawing a horoscope map or examining the entrails of animals and birds, or by observing other signs and signs. In our language today, some terms that remind us of the era of astrology and ancient times, including " unlucky (star)", "good fortune","Happy Days" and "perverted days", and the word "influence" derived from the ether and it was thought that it is a gaseous liquid that cannot be seen, emanating from the stars and "affects" the destinies of people and their actions. As well as the word Lunatic, meaning crazy or Maniac, it is derived from the word moon Luna, because they attributed the symptoms of madness and the like to the influence of the moon. 

The twenty-two pyramids are the oldest monuments built of stone, the numerous structures, the magnificent obelisks and Gates, the tall columns that look like bundles of papyrus reeds, the tombs carved into the rock, the exquisitely made carved statues, the magnificent color renderings are an immortal cultural legacy that ancient Egypt left to the world. This legacy confirms that the ancient Egyptians achieved an advanced rank in engineering and mathematics. The ancient Egyptians began to record and accurately calculate the rise and fall of the Nile waters, and the measurement of the territory, the contours of the boundaries of which were erased by the flood, was the origin of the art of geometry. In contrast, the ancient peoples, especially the Sumerians and ancient Egyptians, were counting on the fingers of the hand, and the number of fingers of the hands became the mathematical basis of the decimal system, and also became the basis for arithmetic notation among the Egyptians. 

The number sixty, which is the compound of ten, and the number twelve, which is one of the numbers by which the number sixty is divided, became the basis of two arithmetic systems: the first is the sexagesimal system, and the second is the twelve-decimal system, and they were widely used in Babylon. The sexagesimal system is still used to divide the hour into sixty minutes, and the minute into sixty seconds. The ancient Egyptians knew addition, subtraction and division, but they used them in ways that are somewhat different from our current methods. They also knew the numbers up to ten, and then multiplied them up to a million. And they were drawing the "million" sign in the form of a human body raising his hands, indicating surprise at the multitude. They also knew fractions, multiplied and divided them, determined the area of a square, rectangle and Triangle, had units of measurement, weight and Kilo.

Medicine

Medicine originated among the ancient societies of the Near East on primitive folk beliefs and then developed over time. Divination and knowledge of the future for the Babylonians was based on the study of animal entrails (in particular, the liver), which provided them with some primitive information about the structure of the human body. This initial information paved the way for the emergence of surgery in medicine. The code of Hammurabi punishes with death every surgeon who pretends to be a legal doctor, as well as the surgeon's fingers are cut off if he opened an abscess in a patient's eye and caused him blindness. The Egyptians paid attention to surgery and outperformed their Babylonian colleagues in it. The custom of embalming the dead by cutting open the human body and removing the entrails from it, helped them to know the internal organs of the body, such as the heart, stomach, intestines, lung, liver and others. They embalmed their dead with materials that to this day are still the subject of research and admiration. And they learned from the practice of embalming also the property of salt and gum in preserving the body of the dead.

Archaeological discoveries have shown that doctors in ancient Egypt were performing delicate surgical operations such as "skull piercing" in addition to some advances in dental surgery.
One of the papyri contained information about the Egyptians ' achievement of knowledge of blood circulation and the relationship of the pulse to the heart, and the connection of the heart with vessels distributed in all parts of the body. The papyri also included medical texts dealing with some surgical aspects of medicine such as abscesses (bags) under the skin, blisters, boils, wounds, fractures, and some pathological conditions in women. The Egyptians enacted a literary system in the treatment that requires the doctor to openly declare to the patient the extent of his ability to treat the disease after diagnosis, as he had to declare one of the following phrases: "this disease I can not treat", or "this disease is likely to be treated", or "this disease I can treat". The ancient Egyptians included specialists in obstetrics and gynecology, ophthalmologists and others to treat stomach disorders and others.

The ancient Egyptians left us an important author in surgery who put it on a correct scientific basis, which indicates that Egyptian surgeons diagnosed many cases correctly and knew the way to treat them. They prepared most of the medicinal drugs from plants, where a good knowledge of plants was one of the basic things for every Egyptian doctor, and they also increased the use of fruits and herbs. Part of the Egyptian medical knowledge was transmitted to Greece, from there to the Romans and then to other peoples.

Etiquette

The priests were the protectors of Science and knowledge in Mesopotamia and Egypt, they taught the principles of Science and literature to the children of rich families in educational houses subordinate to the structures. The priests in Egypt had status and authority, did not pay taxes imposed on the people, did not perform forced labor and military service.
The head of the Great Royal Stable assumed the Post known today as the minister of education, and the work of the teacher in those days was to graduate clerks to carry out state business and to maintain law and order. Among the tasks of the clerks are the census of the population, the registration of state resources and expenditures, the supervision of Nile gauges to find out what the harvest season will be, as well as the supervision of industry and trade affairs.

The paper used for writing was one of the most important commodities in Egyptian trade, and the manuscripts written on this paper five thousand years ago are still coherent and easy to read. The Egyptians made black ink that does not fade, and the pen was a simple piece of wood or Reed, the tip of which was processed to be like a painter's pen.
The Egyptians are considered the first to devise writing with alphabetic letters, and their writing initially included six hundred signs, many of which represented whole syllables. Then they developed their writing so that they had real alphabets, and that was before the Year 3000 BC.M., The number of these letters amounted to twenty-four letters and were called hieroglyphs, that is, sacred letters, the oldest alphabets known to mankind. The Phoenicians, after the Egyptians, developed their own alphabet (22 letters), which soon spread throughout the world.
Egyptian creative activity in the fields of literature and Fine Arts has reached a high level in terms of quantity and quality. The Egyptians developed wisdom literature and Narrative Art, and they were the first people who tried to put the popular folk story on people's tongues, in a literary template that would earn it continuity and immortality.

The Egyptian civilization is considered one of the greatest in history, this is due to the luxury it enjoyed and to the bounties with which its fertile land was overflowing. Egypt, with its small area, has played a significant role in the history of civilization that has not been played by nations with large areas.