This paper is based on a set of 800 mathematical tablets from Nippur---the cultural capital of Mesopotamia---dating from the Old Babylonian period (beginning of the second millennium BC) and excavated at the end of the 19th century by an American archaeological team. This set is mainly composed of school tablets and has been divided into three collections now in Philadelphia, Istanbul and Jena. It is only recently that these collections were studied systematically. Their analysis allows us to reconstitute the whole curriculum of scribal mathematical education from beginners' learning exercises in measures and numbers to advanced level volume problems. This paper focuses on the way measures and numbers are written and displayed on the tablets available to us. By analysing how and in which order these writings were introduced in the curriculum, this article tries to enlighten the specific function which was assigned to each class of graphemes. One of the main goals is to reconstitute the computational practices to which the school exercises refer. The broader issue is to grasp the conception of numbers, surfaces and volumes which was transmitted in the school setting of Nippur, and to better understand the background of the mathematical thought elaborated in southern Mesopotamia at the beginning of the second millennium. Keywords: Mesopotamia, place value notation, metrology, cuneiform writing, scribal school, curriculum, surface, volume, metrological table, nalbanum, brick
...MoreDescription An analysis of the tablets from Nippur in order to reconstitute the computational practices to which the school exercises refer.
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