On the Ancient Egyptian Value for Pi

Do a little searching on the Internet, and youll find the ancient Egyptian value for given as
3.16. Do a little more searching and you might get the more exact answer of

Where did these numbers come from? How did Egyptians discover the procedure for working
with circles in the first place? And finally, did the Egyptians really know anything about , or
was this a later extrapolation?
The document that gets used to find is the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (1650 BC);
sometimes its known as the Ah-mos Papyrus depending on if youre naming it after the
person who purchased it or the person who wrote it. I personally prefer the actual title given
by the author,
Directions for Attaining Knowledge of All Dark Things
but to be consistent with mathematical historians Ill call it the RMP, for Rhind Mathematical
Papyrus.
The RMP itself is divided into 87 problems. (The last three are enigmatic and mangled and
may not be problems at all, so sometimes the count is given as 84.) The problem were
looking at here is #50, the second one on this page.

The translation goes roughly

Example of finding the area of a round field with a diameter of 9 khet. What is its area?
Take away 1/9 of its diameter, namely 1. The remainder is 8.
Multiply 8 times, making 64. Therefore the area is 64 setjat.
(1 khet = about 52.3 meters = about 57.2 yards)
If you like, you can try to work out this point how comes about. You need to compare the
formula the Egyptians get with the circle area formula of
. Come back when youre ready.
Given a diameter of 2r, 1/9 of it is:
So cut off 1/9 of the diameter we subtract from the original diameter:
And were left with :
Turning that length into the side of a square, the area is the expression squared:

With simplification it becomes:

Voila, by matching this formula with

, out comes a value of 256/81 for .

Thats lovely, but how did the Egyptians know that such a strange procedure would get the
right area? Its possible they came up with it using raw experimentation, but theres a hint one
page back in the manuscript of what the Egyptians were really up to.

This is from problem 48, which is a touch enigmatic. Theres no stated goal, just the
calculation, which gives the area of the square as 81, and the area of the circle (octagon?) on
the inside as 64.
Whether the figure is an octagon or a circle is up for some debate. Richard Gillings argues it
is an octagon, because the other circles that show up in the manuscript (like for #50) are
obviously drawn as circles, but its possible the author affected a different stroke because the
figure is inscribed within a square. Im going with circle, because an area of 64 for the
octagon isnt just approximate, its wrong.
(The argument that follows is also courtesy Richard Gillings.)

Even using the simplest of methods (just count!) it isnt hard to find an area of 63 for the
octagon. Noting that a circle isnt too far off from the octagon

and that the 18 missing squares can be arranged (with one overlapping) like so

Its quite possible to imagine the area of the circle as the approximate area of the 8 by 8
square remaining.
The question I want to raise about all this is: did the Egyptians really know anything about
at all? Is it fair to compare what they did to Newtons 15 digits, when the presumed value is
extrapolated from a single procedure in the RMP?

In the Indian text Sulba Sutras there is a different value for the area procedure and the
circumference procedure. I argue the Egyptian achievement is comparable its a procedure,
not actual knowledge of the ratio and the caveat needs to be noted in histories of the
number.