Chapter 1 - Babylonian Mathematics

Summary

Sources

When we speak of Babylonian mathematics we mean the kind of mathematics cultivated in ancient Mesopotamia—the country between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris or, roughly, what is known as Iraq today. We are therefore using the term Babylonian in a wider sense than is customary in accounts of the political history of the Near East, where it refers to the state about the city Babylon.

Until quite recently one knew of Babylonian mathematics only through scattered references in the classical Greek literature to Chaldean, i.e. Babylonian, mathematicians and astronomers. On the basis of these references it was assumed that the Babylonians had had some sort of number mysticism or numerology; but we now know how far short of the truth this assumption was.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century archeologists began digging in the ancient city mounds in Mesopotamia. These mounds are made up of the debris of the long-lived cities of the past. The houses were built mostly of unbaked brick (as they often are even today), and every rainfall washed a bit of them off. New houses were built on the same sites and little by little the ground level rose until the present mounds were formed. This process is still going on, for some of these city mounds are even now crowned by inhabited villages, direct descendants of ancient cities. Thus, if we make a vertical cross-section of a mound, we find layer upon layer of different stages of the same city, the oldest at the bottom.