Read without ads and support Scribd by becoming a Scribd Premium Reader.

Language:

Download

Go BackAdd Note

Link

Embed

Save for later

Third Millennium Chronology

The table below gives a summary chronology of third millennium Mesopotamia. The intent is toshow the basic periodization, rather than any details. Most dates are approximate and all areBC(E). Period divisions are fairly arbitrary and have been conspicuously rounded.

Period Date

Events Sources

Uruk IV3200-3100emergence of writing,complexmetrology6000 tablets, mostly from Uruk.85% administrative.Uruk III/Jemdet Nasr 3100-2900Early Dynastic(ED) I, II2900-2600large-scaleirrigation,GilgameshUr ED III (Fara)2600-2450literaturemultiplication table, geometrical exercises,'division' problems.ED III (Pre-Sargonic)2450-2350mix of archaicandcuneiform signsLagashSargonic =Old Akkadian2350-2200first empire About a dozen exercise tablets.Ur III2100-2000state controlc. 100000 tablets, about 45000 published,mostly economic documents.

There are many problems with third millennium chronology. Where the sources areabundant, we often have a detailed and precise relative chronology, without necessarilybeing able to translate this into a secure absolute chronology. That is, we know what orderevents happened and how long they took, but we may not be able to assign dates in ourdating system. Of course, for those periods where we have few primary sources, anabsolute chronology can be even more difficult to obtain. In addition to the problems of dating, periodization in third millennium Mesopotamia is complicated by the varyingterminology and concerns coming from different disciplines: there are archaeological levelsand type-sites; historical periods derived from literature and political and economicdocuments, and linguistic periods determined by philological criteria. The table above isintended to give only an approximate and outline periodization, sufficient for the purposesof this survey. A good recent discussion of some of the problems in Near Eastern

chronology, accompanied by many references, is in A. Kuhrt,

The Ancient Near East c.3000-330 BC

, Routledge, 1995, pp. 8-72.

Third Millennium Mathematics

Many people are aware of the earliest mathematical artifacts, the tokens of the Near East, andequally well-known is the flourishing of mathematics in the Old Babylonian period. Theintervening period is much less well-known, and yet this crucial third millennium witnessed thedevelopment of abstract numbers and the arrival of the famous sexagesimal place valuesystem. This section of the site gives a brief overview of third millennium mathematics. Fromsome places and times, we have a great abundance of tablets and are able to build up a detailed picture of mathematical practices; at others the archaeological record is sparse and we shall passin silence over great passages of time about which we know nothing.Most of the sites in Mesopotamia yielding good third millennium tablets are found in thesouthern region, in Sumer, although one important site, Jemdet Nasr, is further north. It is believed that this southern region, containing such cities as Ur and Uruk, was the most developedarea at the time, but how much this conclusion could be challenged by new archaeologicalevidence is unclear. Certainly the current excavations of Hamoukar in the far north could provideimportant new information and the standard view of the Uruk expansion in the fourth millenniumseems to be undergoing some revisions which will doubtless affect our view of the subsequent periods (see, for example,Algaze (1993),Stein (1999)andVan de Mieroop (1997)). We restrict our attention here to core Mesopotamia and say nothing about the important sources from Ebla tothe northwest (seeArchi (1989),Friberg (1986)

) and Elam in the southeast (Damerow andEnglund (1989)).

Chronology: Summary chronology of the Third Millennium.

Archaic Mathematics: Emergence of mathematics in late Fourth Millennium.

Early Dynastic

Sargonic

Ur III

Tablets

Bibliography This section is largely based on a talk I gave at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics in June 2000, and the paper that appeared in thesubsequent

Proceedings

Tokens: the origin of mathematics

Tokens are small geometric clay objects (cylinders, cones, spheres, etc.) found all over the Near East from about 8000 B.C. until the development of writing. Their significance as the precursorsof both mathematics and writing was first recognized by Denise Schmandt-Besserat of theUniversity of Texas at Austin in the early 1970's. Her theories as to their development, usage andsignificance have been elaborated and refined in a series of publications over the past 20 years.This brief summary is largely based on her writings.Tokens are first identified at around the same time as the local peoples changed from a life basedon hunting and gathering to one based on agriculture. The tokens, as Schmandt-Besserat says,"were part and parcel of the Neolithic phenomenon; that is, the so-called agricultural revolution."(Before Writing 41).The earliest tokens were simple shapes and were comparatively unadorned; they stood for basicagricultural commodities such as grain and sheep. A specific shape of token always represented aspecific quantity of a particular item. For example, "the cone ... stood for a small measure of grain, the sphere represented a large measure of grain, the ovoid stood for a jar of oil." (BeforeWriting 161). Here are some examples of simple tokens.Two jars of oil would be represented by two ovoids, three jars by three ovoids, and so on. Thus,the tokens presented an abstraction of the things being counted, but also a system of greatspecificity and precision. The abstract notion of 'fiveness' had not yet been separated from whatwas being counted.With the development of cities came a more complex economy and more complex socialstructures. This cultural evolution is reflected in the tokens, which begin to appear in a muchgreater diversity of shapes and are given more complicated designs of incisions and holes. Hereare some examples of complex tokens.The standardization of the tokens meant that they had great power for record-keeping andcontracts in a way that counting using pebbles or twigs would not do. A collection of tokenscould represent a future promised transaction, or be kept in an archive (in a temple or palace) asa record of a past transaction. Both contracts and archives require secure methods of keepinggroups of tokens. The Mesopotamians devised two main systems of storage. The first involved piercing the tokens with small holes, stringing them on a piece of cord and attaching the ends of the string to a solid lump of clay, called a bulla. Bullae typically are of a size to fit in the palm of a hand and are marked with impressions of a cylinder seal to identify the parties to thetransaction and prevent later tampering. Any attempt to alter the number or type of tokens wouldinvolve breaking the seals.The second major method was storing the tokens inside a hollow clay envelope, which was thenmarked by a seal. These two methods were contemporaneous, though, curiously, the two systemswere used differentially for plain and complex tokens. "For reason we do not know, plain tokenswere most often secured by envelopes and complex tokens by bullae." (Before Writing 110).Of the two systems, the practice of storing tokens in clay envelopes was the more significant for the development of mathematics. Envelopes provided a solution to the problem of secure storage