MODULE NO.

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NORTH CENTRAL MINDANAO COLLEGE
Maranding, Lala, Lanao del Norte

Topic

Number Recording of the Babylonians

Rationale

This topic will focus on the evolution of numbers and discuss about the Early Number Systems &
Symbols, where number is originated and why it is created on the long process.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Students should have a good general idea of the evolution of some of the major
concepts of modern mathematics.

Activity/Activities

Lecture, Online Quiz

Discussion

Number Recording of the Babylonians

“Babylonian” is used without chronological restrictions to refer to those peoples who,

many thousands of years ago, occupied the alluvial plain between the twin rivers,
the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Greeks called this land “Mesopotamia, “meaning
“the land between the rivers.” Most of it today is part of the modern state of Iraq,
although both the Tigris and the Euphrates rise in Turkey. Humans stepped over the
threshold of civilization in this region—and more especially in the lowland marshes
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near the Persian Gulf—about the same time that humans did in Egypt, that is, about
3500 B.C. or possibly a little earlier. Although the deserts surrounding Egypt
successfully protected it against invasions, the open plains of the Tigris-Euphrates
valley made it less defensible. The early history of Mesopotamia is largely the story of
incessant invaders who, attracted by the richness of the land, conquered their
decadent predecessors, absorbed their culture, and then settled into a placid
enjoyment of wealth until they were themselves overcome by the next wave of
intruders.
Shortly after 3000 B.C., the Babylonians developed a system of writing from
“pictographs”—a kind of picture writing much like hieroglyphics. But the materials
chosen for writing imposed special limitations of their own, which soon robbed the
pic-tographs of any resemblance to the objects they stood for. Whereas the
Egyptians used pen and ink to keep their records, the Babylonians used first a reed
and later a stylus with a triangular end. With this they made impressions (rather than
scratches) in moist clay. Clay dries quickly, so documents had to be relatively short
and written all at one time, but they were virtually indestructible when baked hard in
an oven or by the heat of the sun. (Contrast this with the Chinese method, which
involved more perishable writing material such as bark or bamboo and did not allow
keeping permanent evidence of the culture’s early attainments.) The sharp edge of
a stylus made a vertical stroke and the base made a more or less deep
impression so that the combined effect was a head-and-tail gure resembling a
wedge, or nail Because the Latin word for “wedge”is cuneus, the resulting style
of writing has become known as “cuneiform. “Cuneiform script was a natural
consequence of the choice of clay as a writing medium. The stylus did not allow for
drawing curved lines, so all pictographic symbols had to be composed of wedges
oriented in different ways: vertical horizontal and oblique . Another
wedge was later added to these three types; it looked something like an angle
bracket opening to the right and was made by holding the stylus so that its sides
were inclined to the clay tablet. These four types of wedges had to serve for all
drawings, because executing others was considered too tiresome for the hand or
too time-consuming. Unlike hieroglyphics, which remained a picture writing until near
the end of Egyptian civilization, cuneiform characters were gradually simplified until
the pictographic originals were no longer apparent. The nearest the Babylonians
could get to the old circle representing the sun was , which was later
condensed still further to . Similarly, the symbol for a fish, which began as

ended up as . The net effect of cuneiform script seems, to the uninitiated, “like
bird tracks in wet sand.” Only within the last two centuries has anyone known what
the many extant cuneiform writings meant, and indeed whether they were writing or
simply decoration.

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Deciphering Cuneiform: Grotefend and Rawlinson

Because there were no colossal temples or monuments to capture the

archeological imagination (the land is practically devoid of building stone),
excavation came later to this part of the ancient world than to Egypt. It is estimated
that today there are at least 400,000 Babylonian clay tablets, generally the size of a
hand, scattered among the museums of various countries. Of these, some 400
tablets or tablet fragments have been identified as having mathematical content.
Their decipherment and interpretation have gone slowly, owing to the variety of
dialects and natural modications in the language over the intervening several
thousand years.

The initial step was taken by an obscure German school teacher, Georg Friedrich
Grotefend (1775–1853), of Gottingen, who although well versed in classical Greek,
was absolutely ignorant of Oriental languages. While drinking with friends, Grotefend
wagered that he could decipher a certain cuneiform inscription from Persepolis
provided that they would supply him with the previously published literature on the
subject. By an inspired guess he found the key to reading Persian cuneiform. The
prevailing arrangement of the characters was such that the points of the wedges
headed either downward or to the right, and the angles formed by the broad
wedges consistently opened to the right. He assumed that the language’s
characters were alphabetic; he then began picking out those characters that
occurred with the greatest frequency and postulated that these were vowels. The
most recurrent sign group was assumed to represent the word for “king.” These
suppositions allowed Grotefend to decipher the title “King of Kings” and the names
Darius, Xerxes, and Hystapes. Thereafter, he was able to isolate a great many
individual characters and to read 12 of them correctly. Grotefend thus produced a
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translation that, although it contained numerous errors, gave an adequate idea of
the contents. In 1802, when Grotefend was only 27 years old, he had his
investigations presented to the Academy of Science in Gottingen (Grotefend was
not allowed to read his own paper). ̈But the achievements of this little-known
scholar, who neither belonged to the faculty of the university nor was even an
Orientalist by profession, only evoked ridicule from the learned body. Buried in an
obscure publication, Grotefend’s brilliant discovery fell into oblivion, and decade’s
later cuneiform script had to be deciphered anew. It is one of
the whims of history that Champollion, the original translator of hieroglyphics, won an
international reputation, while Georg Grotefend is almost entirely ignored.

Few chapters in the discovery of the ancient world can rival for interest the
copying
Of the monumental rock inscriptions at Behistun by Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810
–1895). Rawlinson, who was an officer in the Indian Army, became interested in
cuneiform inscriptions when posted to Persia in 1835 as an advisor to the shah’s
troops. He learned the language and toured the country extensively, exploring its
many antiquities. Rawlinson’s attention was soon turned to Behistun, where a
towering rock cliff, the “Mountain of the Gods,” rises dramatically above an ancient
caravan road to Babylon. There, in 516 B.C., Darius the Great caused a lasting
monument to his accomplishments to be engraved on a specially prepared surface
measuring 150 feet by 100 feet. The inscription is written in thirteen panels in three
languages—Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian (the language of the
Babylonians)—all using a cuneiform script. Above the five panels of Persian writing,
the artists chiselled a life-size gure in relief of Darius receiving the submission of ten
rebel leaders who had disputed his right to the throne.

Although the Behistun Rock has been called by some the Mesopotamian Rosetta
Stone, the designation is not entirely apt. The Greek text on the Rosetta Stone
allowed
Champollion to proceed from the known to the unknown, whereas all three
passages of the Behistun trilingual were written in the same unknown cuneiform
script. However,
Old Persian, with its mainly alphabetic script limited to 43 signs, had been the subject
of serious investigation since the beginning of the nineteenth century. This version of
the text was ultimately to provide the key of admission into the whole cuneiform
world.

The first difficulty lay in copying the long inscription. It is cut 400 feet above the
ground on the face of a rock mass that it rises 1700 feet above the plain. Since the
stone steps were destroyed after the sculptors finished their work, there was no
means of ascent. Rawlinson had to construct enormous ladders to get to the
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inscription and at times had to be suspended by block and tackle in front of the
almost precipitous rock face. By the end of 1837, he had copied approximately half
the 414 lines of Persian text; and using methods akin to those Grotefend worked out
for himself 35 years earlier, he had translated the first two paragraphs. Rawlinson’s
goal was to transcribe every bit of the inscription on the Behistun Rock, but
unfortunately war broke out between Great Britain and Afghanistan in 1839.
Rawlinson was transferred to active duty in Afghanistan, where he was cut off by
siege for the better part of the next two years. The year 1843 again found him back
in Baghdad, this time as British consul, eager to continue to copy, decipher, and
interpret the remainder of the Behistun inscription. His complete translation of the Old
Persian part of the text, along with a copy of all the 263 lines of the Elamite, was
published in 1846. Next he tackled the third class of cuneiform writing on the
monument, the Babylonian, which was cut on two sides of a ponderous boulder
overhanging the Elamite panels. Despite great danger to life and limb, Rawlinson
obtained paper squeezes (casts) of 112 lines. With the help of the already translated
Persian text, which contained numerous proper names, he assigned correct values
to a total of 246 characters. During this work, he
discovered an important feature of Babylonian writing, the principle of “polyphony”;
that is, the same sign could stand for different consonantal sounds, depending on
the vowel that followed. Thanks to Rawlinson’s remarkable efforts, the cuneiform
enigma was penetrated, and the vast records of Mesopotamian civilization were
now an open book.

The Babylonian Positional Number System

From the exhaustive studies of the last half-century, it is apparent that Babylonian
mathematics was far more highly developed than had hitherto been imagined. The
Babylonians were the only pre-Grecian people who made even a partial use of a
positional number system. Such systems are based on the notion of place value, in
which the value of a symbol depends on the position it occupies in the numerical
representation. Their immense advantage over other systems is that a limited set of
symbols suffices to express numbers, no matter how large or small. The Babylonian
scale of enumeration was not decimal, but sexagesimal (60 as a base), so that every
place a “digit” is moved to the left increases its value by a factor of 60. When whole
numbers are represented in the sexagesimal system, the last space is reserved for the
numbers from 1 to 59, the next-to-last space for the multiples of 60, preceded by
multiples of 602, and so on. For example, the Babylonian 3 25 4 might stand for the
number

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as in our decimal (base 10) system.

The Babylonian use of the sexagesimal place-value notation was confirmed by
two tablets found in 1854 at Senkerah on the Euphrates by the English geologist W. K.
Loftus. These tablets, which probably date from the period of Hammurabi (2000
B.C.), give the squares of all integers from 1 to 59 and their cubes as far as that of 32.
The tablet of squares reads easily up to 72, or 49. Where we should expect to find 64,
the tablet gives 1 4; the only thing that makes sense is to let 1 stand for 60. Following
82, the value of 92 is listed as 1 21, implying again that the left digit must represent 60.
The same scheme is followed throughout the table until we come to the last entry,
which is 58 1; this cannot but mean

The disadvantages of Egyptian hieroglyphic numeration are obvious. Representing

even small numbers might necessitate relatively many symbols (to represent 999, no
less than 27 hieroglyphs were required); and with each new power of 10, a new
symbol had to be invented. By contrast, the numerical notation of the Babylonians
emphasized two-wedge characters. The simple upright wedge had the value 1
and could be used nine times, while the broad sideways wedge stood for 10 and
could be used up to five times. The Babylonians, proceeding along the same lines as
the Egyptians, made up all other numbers of combinations of these symbols, each
represented as often as it was needed. When both symbols were used, those
indicating tens appeared to the left of those for ones, as in

Appropriate spacing between tight groups of symbols corresponded to descending

powers of 60, read from left to right. As an illustration, we have

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instead of using a tens symbol followed by nine units:

Babylonian positional notation in its earliest development lent itself to conflicting

interpretations because there was no symbol for zero. There was no way to
distinguish between the numbers

since each was represented in cuneiform by

One could only rely on the context to relieve the ambiguity. A gap was often used to
indicate that a whole sexagesimal place was missing, but this rule was not strictly
applied and confusion could result. Someone recopying the tablet might not notice
the empty space, and would put the gures closer together, thereby altering the
value of the number. (Only in a positional system must the existence of an empty
space be specified, so the Egyptians did not encounter this problem.) From 300 B.C.
on, a separate symbol

called a divider, was introduced to serve as a placeholder, thus indicating an empty

space between two digits inside a number. With this, the number 84 was readily
distinguishable from 3624, the latter being represented by

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Thus, the Babylonians of antiquity never achieved an absolute positional system.

Their numerical representation expressed the relative order of the digits, and context
alone decided the magnitude of a sexagesimally written number; since the base
was so large, it was usually evident what value was intended. To remedy this
shortcoming, let us agree to use a semicolon to separate integers from fractions,
while all other sexagesimal places will be separated from one another by commas.
With this convention, 25,0,3;30 and 25,0;3,30 will mean, respectively,

Note that neither the semicolon nor the comma had any counterpart in the original
cuneiform texts.

According to Theon of Alexandria, a commentator of the fourth century, 60 was

among all the numbers the most convenient since it was the smallest among all those
that had the most divisors, and hence the most easily handled. Theon’s point seemed
to be that because 60 had a large number of proper divisors, namely, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10,
12, 15, 20, and 30, certain useful fractions could be represented conveniently. The
integers 30, 20 and 15 could represent 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4:

Fractions that had nonterminating sexagesimal expansions were approximated by finite

ones, so that every number presented the form of an integer. The result was a simplicity
of calculation that eluded the Egyptians, who reduced all their fractions to sums of
fractions with numerator 1.

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Others attached a “natural” origin to the sexagesimal system; their theory was that
the early Babylonians reckoned the year at 360 days, and a higher base of 360 was
chosen first, then lowered to 60. Perhaps the most satisfactory explanation is that it
evolved from the merger between two peoples of whom one had adopted the
decimal system, whereas the other brought with them a 6-system, affording the
advantage of being divisible by 2 and by 3. (The origin of the decimal system is not
logical but anatomical; humans have been provided with a natural abacus—their
fingers and toes.)

The advantages of the Babylonian place-value system over the Egyptian additive
computation with unit fractions were so apparent that this method became the
principal instrument of calculation among astronomers. We see this numerical notation
in full use in Ptolemy’s outstanding work, the Megale Syntaxis (The Great Collection).
The Arabs later passed this on to the West under the curious name Almagest (The
Greatest). The Almagest so overshadowed its predecessors that until the time of
Copernicus, it was the fundamental textbook on astronomy. In one of the early
chapters, Ptolemy announced that he would be carrying out all his calculations in the
sexagesimal system to avoid “the embarrassment of [Egyptian] fractions.”

Writing in Ancient China

Our study of early mathematics is limited mostly to the peoples of Mediterranean

antiquity, chie y the Greeks, and their debt to the Egyptians and the inhabitants of the
Fertile Crescent. Nevertheless, some general comment is called for about the
civilizations of the Far East, and especially about its oldest and most central civilization,
that of China. Although Chinese society was no older than the other river valley
civilizations of the ancient world, it flourished long before those of Greece and Rome. In
the middle of the second millennium B.C., the Chinese were already keeping records of
astronomical events on bone fragments, some of which are extant. Indeed, by 1400
B.C., the Chinese
had a positional numeration system that used nine signs.

The scarcity of reliable sources of information almost completely seals from us the
history of the ancient Orient. In India, no mathematical text exists that can be ascribed
with any certainty to the pre-Christian era; and the first date that can be connected
with a Chinese work, namely, the Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Arts, is 150 B.C.

Much of the difference in availability of sources of information is to be ascribed to

differences in climate between the Near East and the Far East. The dry climate and soil
of Egypt and Babylonia preserved materials that would long since have perished in
more moist climates, materials that make it possible for us to trace the progress of these
cultures from the barbarism of the remote past to the full power of civilization. No other
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countries provide so rich a harvest of information about the origin and transmission of
mathematics. “The Egyptians who lived in the cultivated part of the country,” wrote
Herodotus in his History, “by their practice of keeping records of the past, have made
themselves much the best historians of any nation that I have experienced.”

If China had had Egypt’s climate, there is no question that many records would
have survived from antiquity, each with its story to tell of the intellectual life of earlier
generations. But the ancient Orient was a “bamboo civilization,” and among the
manifold uses of this plant was making books. The small bamboo slips used were
prepared by splitting the smooth section between two knots into thin strips, which were
then dried over a re and scraped off. The narrowness of the bamboo strips made it
necessary to arrange the written characters in vertical lines running from top to bottom,
a practice that continues to this day. The opened, dried, and scraped strips of bamboo
were laid side by side, joined, and kept in proper place by four crosswise cords.
Naturally enough the joining cords often rotted and broke, with the result that the order
of the slips was lost and could be re-established only by a careful reading of the text.
(Another material used about that time for writing was silk, which presumably came
into use because bamboo books or wooden tablets were too heavy and
cumbersome.) The great majority of these ancient books was irretrievably lost to the
ravages of time and nature. Those few available today are known only as brief
fragments.

Another factor making chronological accounts less trustworthy for China than for
Egypt and Babylonia is that books tended to accumulate in palace or government
libraries, where they disappeared in the great interdynastic upheavals. There is a story
that in 221 B.C., when China was united under the despotic emperor Shih Huang-ti, he
tried to destroy all books of learning and nearly succeeded. Fortunately, many books
were preserved in secret hiding places or in the memory of scholars, who feverishly
reproduced them in the following dynasty. But such events make the dating of
mathematical discoveries far from easy.

Modern science and technology, as all the world knows, grew up in western Europe,
with the life of Galileo marking the great turning point. Yet between the first and
fifteenth
centuries, the Chinese who experienced nothing comparable to Europe’s Dark Ages,
were generally much in advance of the West. Not until the scientific revolution of the
later stages of the Renaissance did Europe rapidly draw ahead. Before China’s isolation
and inhibition, she transmitted to Europe a veritable abundance of inventions and
technological discoveries, which were often received by the West with no clear idea of
where they originated. No doubt the three greatest discoveries of the Chinese—ones
that changed Western civilization, and indeed the civilization of the whole world—were
gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper and printing. The subject of paper is of
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great interest; and we know almost to the day when the discovery was first made. A
popular account of the time tells that Tshai Lun, the director of imperial workshops in
A.D. 105, went to the emperor and said, “Bamboo tablets are so heavy and silk so
expensive that I sought for a way of mixing together the fragments of bark, bamboo,
and I have made a very thin material that is suitable for writing.” It took more than a
thousand years for paper to make its way from China to Europe, first appearing in Egypt
about 900 and then in Spain about 1150.

All the while mathematics was overwhelmingly concerned with practical matters
that were important to a bureaucratic government: land measurement and surveying,
taxation, the making of canals and dikes, granary dimensions, and so on. The
misconception that the Chinese made considerable progress in theoretical
mathematics is due to the Jesuit missionaries who arrived in Peking in the early 1600s.
Finding that one of the most `important governmental departments was known as the
Office of Mathematics, they assumed that its function was to promote mathematical
studies throughout the empire. Actually it consisted of minor officials trained in
preparing the calendar. Throughout Chinese history the main importance of
mathematics was in making the calendar, for its promulgation was considered a right
of the emperor, corresponding to the issue of minted coins. In an agricultural economy
so dependent on artificial irrigation, it was necessary to be forewarned of the
beginning and end of the rainy monsoon season, as well as of the melting of the snows
and the consequent rise of the rivers. The person who could give an accurate calendar
to the people could thereby claim great importance.

Because the establishment of the calendar was a jealously guarded prerogative, it

is not surprising that the emperor was likely to view any independent investigations with
alarm. “In China,” wrote the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (died 1610), “it is forbidden
under
pain of death to study mathematics, without the Emperor’s authorization.” Regarded
as
a servant of the more important science astronomy, mathematics acquired a practical
orientation that precluded the consideration of abstract ideas. Little mathematics was
undertaken for its own sake in China.

Assessment

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Resources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_cuneiform_numerals
2. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PWDafehDPJ1roasu64aC7kQ-j4RNhcOD

Prepared By

Joenah A. Malubay
CAS Faculty

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