# An Ancient Egyptian Mathematical Photo Album: JSesh Hieroglyph Program

Author(s):
Cynthia J. Huffman (Pittsburg State University)

Instructors may want to create assignments that involve hieroglyph numerals not available in photographs. Of course, one can draw hieroglyphs by hand as the Egyptian scribes did. However, there is an Egyptian hieroglyph word processor available, called JSesh (Sesh is the Egyptian word for scribe). JSesh can be freely downloaded. The hieroglyphs are organized using a system widely employed by Egyptologists and created by Sir Alan H. Gardiner (1879–1963), who wrote the classic middle Egyptian hieroglyph text Egyptian Grammar. The hieroglyphs are classified into 25 categories, such as: man and his occupations, mammals, birds, temple furniture and sacred emblems, and strokes, along with an unclassified section and three other sections—tall narrow signs, low narrow signs, and broad narrow signs. Unfortunately, there is not a section on numerals. The JSesh hieroglyphs can be copied into other programs such as Word or saved as image files. The table below contains a selection of mathematical hieroglyphs as jpg files that can be copied or saved as images on a hard drive to make it easier for readers to access them for classroom use.

 Hieroglyph Meaning Gardiner Classification one Z1 ten V20 hundred V1 thousand M12 ten thousand D50 hundred thousand I8 million C11 fraction/part D21 $\frac{2}{3}$ D22 $\frac{3}{4}$ D23 $\frac{1}{2}$ Aa16 $\frac{1}{4}$ Z9 cubit D42 or palm D48 or D48a finger (measure) D50

Cynthia J. Huffman (Pittsburg State University), "An Ancient Egyptian Mathematical Photo Album: JSesh Hieroglyph Program," Convergence (April 2022)