Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
mathematics
Eleanor Robson
University of Cambridge
Outline
Introducing ourselves
Going to school in ancient Babylonia
Learning about Babylonian shapes
Learning about Babylonian numbers
Question time
We live
here
and
here
The Babylonians
lived here, 50002000 years ago
Babylonia, 19001650 BC
Cities and writing for
1500 years already
Brick-built cities on
rivers and canals
Wealth through
farming: barley and
sheep
Central temples, to
worship many gods
King Hammurabi
(17921750 BC)
Most children didnt
go to school
Babylonian men
and women
Cuneiform writing
Wedges on clay
Whole words
Syllables
Word types
600 different signs
Sumerian language
No known relatives
Akkadian language
Cuneiform objects
Professional scribes
Employed by:
Temples
Palaces
Courts of law
Rich families
Status:
Slaves
Senior officials
Nobility
In order to write:
Receipts and lists
Monthly and annual
accounts
Loans, rentals, and sales
Marriage contracts,
dowries, and wills
Royal inscriptions
Records of legal disputes
Letters
Im an archaeologist
of maths
Archaeology is the study of rubbish
To discover how people lived and died
To discover how people made and used
objects to work with and think with
Imagine an earthquake
destroys your school in
the middle of the night
An archaeologist comes to your
school 500 years from now
What mathematical things might she
find in your school?
What would they tell her about the
maths you do?
Some mathematical
things in modern schools
Text books and exercise books
Scrap paper and doodles
Mathematical instruments from
rulers to calculators
Mathematical displays from models
to posters
Computer files and hardware
The archaeology of
Babylonian maths
Tablets dont rot
like paper or
papyrus do
They got lost,
thrown away,
or re-used
Archaeologists
dig them up just
like pots, bones or
buildings
Looking at things in
context tells us far
more than studying
single objects
What sort of people
wrote those tablets
and why?
Maths at school:
House F
A small house in Nippur,
10m x 5m
Dug by archaeologists in 1951
Used as a school in the 1740s
BC nearly 4000 years ago!
1400 fragments of tablets
with school exercises
Tablets now in Chicago,
Philadelphia, and Baghdad
Cultural preferences
Horizontal base
Vertical axis of symmetry
Equilateral
back
Babylonian numbers
Different: cuneiform signs pressed into
clay
Vertical wedges 19
Arrow wedges 1050
1 30
1
30
Base 10 equivalent
1 x 60 = 60 3 x 10 = 30 60 + 30 = 90
1
1 x 3600 =
3600
30 x 60 =
1800
3600 + 1800 =
5400
Babylonian numbers
Try to
write:
32
23
18
81
167
4 1/2
32
23
18
81 = 60 + 21
167 = 120 + 47
4 1/2 = 4 + 30/60
Multiplication tables
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
[12]
13
30
1
1 30
2
2 30
3
3 30
4
4 30
5
5 30
6
6 30
continued
[14
[15
16
17
18
20-1
20
30
40
50
7]
7 30]
[8]
[8 30]
9
9 30
10
15
20
25
Questions