Mathematics, metrology, and professional numeracy

Since the great decipherments of the 1930s and 40s (Neugebauer 1935–37; Thureau-Dangin 1938; Neugebauer and Sachs 1945) Babylonia has had a well-deserved reputation as the home of the world’s first ‘true’ mathematics, in which abstract ideas and techniques were explored and developed with no immediate practical end in mind. It is commonly understood that the base 60 systems of time measurement and angular degrees have their ultimate origins in Babylonia, and that ‘Pythagoras’ theorem’ was known there a millennium before Pythagoras himself was supposed to have lived. Most accounts of Babylonian mathematics describe the internal workings of the mathematics in great detail (e.g., Friberg 1990; Hoyrup and Damerow 2001) but tell little of the reasons for its development, or anything about the people who wrote or thought about it and their reasons for doing so. However, internal textual and physical evidence from the tablets themselves, as well as museological and archaeological data, are increasingly enabling Babylonian mathematics to be understood as both a social and an intellectual activity, in relation to other scholarly pursuits and to professional scribal activity. It is important to distinguish between mathematics as an intellectual, supra-utilitarian an end in itself, and professional numeracy as the routine application of mathematical skills by working scribes. This chapter is a brief attempt at a social history of Babylonian mathematics and numeracy (see Robson forthcoming). After a short survey of their origins in early Mesopotamia, it examines the evidence for metrology and mathematics in Old Babylonian scribal schooling and for professional numeracy in second-millennium scribal culture. Very little evidence survives for the period 1600–750 BCE, but there is a wealth of for mid first-millennium Babylonia, typically neglected in the standard accounts of the subject. This chapter is doubtless flawed and incomplete, and may even be misguided, but I hope that at the very least it re-emphasises the ‘Babylonian’ in ‘Babylonian mathematics’.