Egyptian numerals
The system of ancient Egyptian numerals was used in Ancient Egypt around 3000 BC until the early first millennium AD. It was a system of numeration based on the scale of ten, often rounded off to the higher power, written in hieroglyphs, but they had no concept of a place-valued system such as the decimal system is. The hieratic form of numerals stressed an exact finite series notation, ciphered one to one onto the Egyptian alphabet. The Ancient Egyptian system used bases of ten
The following hieroglyphics were used to denote powers of ten:
Multiples of these values were expressed by repeating the symbol as many times as needed. For instance, a stone carving from Karnak shows the number 4622 as
Egyptian hieroglyphs could be written in both directions (and even vertically). This example is written left-to-right and top-down; on the original stone carving, it is right-to-left, and the signs are thus reversed
By 1740 BCE, the Egyptians had a symbol for zero in accounting texts. The symbol nfr, meaning beautiful, was also used to indicate the base level in drawings of tombs and pyramids and distances were measured relative to the base line as being above or below this line.
Rational numbers could also be expressed, but only as sums of unit fractions, i.e., sums of reciprocals of positive integers, except for 2⁄3 and 3⁄4. The hieroglyph indicating a fraction looked like a mouth, which meant "part":
Fractions were written with this fractional solidus, i.e., the numerator 1, and the positive denominator below. Thus, 1⁄3 was written as:
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