No label defined (Q4947974)

This very valuable book has two distinct parts. The main text analyses the known tablets with numerical lists and classifies the numbers according to their appearance in texts involving geometry, construction of canals, bricks and brickwork, and metals. A convincing case is made for the UrIII empire (last century of the third millenium) as the origin of most of the mathematics found later in OB school texts, and that they originated in the organization of a tightly regulated centralized state with rigid bureaucracy. It is shown that many assumptions in later mathematical texts come from (unrealistic) work norms imposed on forced labor in the UrIII period. The mathematics of earlier periods is unrecoverable, but it is clear that the elaborate UrIII system must have had precursors. Therefore, the beginning of Babylonian mathematics and the developed sexagesimal system must be dated much earlier than assumed. This part of the book also contains a linguistically valuable discussion of the terminology used in the old text, Sumerian and Accadic. The second part of the book contains first a complete transliteration of the coefficient lists and then complete editions (Accadic, transliteration, translation, and commentary) of 6 new texts, as well as editions of rough work (auxiliary computations) that can be dated to Old Babylonian times. It also contains a study of baked bricks in British collections, which are shown to exhibit ratios of length/width or more or less exactly three types from pre-Ur to late Assyrian times.