MODULE 1

TITLE: STAGES IN MATHEMATICS HISTORY

TOPIC: BABYLONIAN MATHEMATICS

In ancient times, primitive people settled down in one area by water, built homes,
and relied upon agriculture and animal husbandry. At some point, they began to use
simple concepts of numbers such as 1, 2, simple counting and simple measuring. As
trading, distributing and measuring became more and more complicated, people began
to record a variety of things by using “script” and “writing” on bones and stones, or using
knotted cords.

Figure 1.1 One of the earliest fossilized bones and knotted cords

One of the earliest dated occurrences of the representation of numbers is on a

fossilized bone discovered at Ishango in Zaire, near the headwaters of the Nile River,
and carbon-dated to sometime around 20,000 B.C.E. (see Figure 1.1, left). In the Inca
Empire, which arose from the highlands of Peru sometime in early 13th century, knotted
cords called “quipu” were developed as a means to keep records (see Figure 1.1, right).
The Incas recorded population, production, or other specified meanings by different
types of knots, positions of knots, and colors of cords. Knotted cords are also found in
China, West Africa and Australia

Gradually, ancient mathematics began to grow. It is of interest that the word

“mathematics” comes from the Greeks, which means “learning, study, and science.”
Most of these primitive civilizations did not get more advanced “mathematics” beyond
distinguishing among one, two, and many. For example, certain Australian aboriginal
tribes counted to two only, with any number larger than two called simply “much” or
“many.”

BABYLONIAN MATHEMATICS
 Based on records, the oldest of the world’s civilizations is that of Mesopotamia
which emerged in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, now the southern part of
modern Iraq, around 5000 B.C. This was a rich area where there were ocean coasts,
rivers, mountains, plains, deserts, swamps and meadows.

Many kingdoms arose in this area over the next 3000 years, including one
based in the city of Babylon 3around 1700 B.C. Hammurabi, the ruler of Babylon, one of
the city-states, had expanded his rule to much of Mesopotamia. The term “Babylonian”
covers a series of peoples, who concurrently or successively occupied this area. A
professional army had come into existence, and a middle class of merchants and
artisans had grown up between peasants and officials.

• Clay Tablets As early as 3000 B.C., writing began and was done by means of a
stylus on clay tablets. These tablets were inscribed when the clay was still soft and then
baked. Hence, the tablets became very hard and well preserved. Our main information
about Babylonia, over the course of many years, comes from these clay tablets. They
were dated from two periods: some from about 2000 B.C., and a large number from the
period 600 - 300 B.C. The written tradition died out under Greek domination in 100 B.C.
and remained totally lost until the 19th century. It was Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895)
who was first able to translate some of them.

Among all discovered Babylonian clay tablets, about three hundred are on
mathematics. There are two kinds: one kind gave “mathematical tables” such as a table
of “multiplication,” and tables of “square roots,” etc.; another kind is collections of
mathematical problems.

Figure 1.2
Plimpton 322
Babylonian clay tablet

Plimpton 322 clay tablet

The famous and controversial Plimpton 322 clay tablet, believed to date from around
1800 BCE, suggests that the Babylonians may well have known the secret of right-
angled triangles (that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the
other two sides) many centuries before the Greek Pythagoras. The tablet appears to
list 15 perfect Pythagorean triangles with whole number sides, although some claim that
they were merely academic exercises, and not deliberate manifestations of
Pythagorean triples.
• Counting The Babylonia number system was based on a sexegesimal, or base
60, numeric system, which could be counted physically using the twelve knuckles on
one hand the five fingers on the other hand. Unlike those of the Egyptians, Greeks and
Romans, Babylonian numbers used a true place-value system, where digits written in
the left column represented larger values, much as in the modern decimal system,
although of course using base 60 not base 10. Thus, in the Babylonian system
represented 3,600 plus 60 plus 1, or 3,661. Also, to represent the numbers 1 – 59 within
each place value, two distinct symbols were used, a unit symbol ( ) and a ten symbol (
) which were combined in a similar way to the familiar system of Roman numerals (e.g.
23 would be shown as ). Thus, represents 60 plus 23, or 83. However, the
number 60 was represented by the same symbol as the number 1 and, because they
lacked an equivalent of the decimal point, the actual place value of a symbol often had
to be inferred from the context.

Babylonian Numerals

It has been conjectured that Babylonian advances in mathematics were probably

facilitated by the fact that 60 has many divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 and
60 – in fact, 60 is the smallest integer divisible by all integers from 1 to 6), and the
continued modern-day usage of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and
360 (60 x 6) degrees in a circle, are all testaments to the ancient Babylonian system. It
is for similar reasons that 12 (which has factors of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6) has been such a
popular multiple historically (e.g. 12 months, 12 inches, 12 pence, 2 x 12 hours, etc).
The Babylonians also used fractions such as 1/2, 1/3 and 2/3. We do not know how the
base 60 came to be used. It could have come from weight measures with values
involving 1/2, 1/3 and 2/3. It could reflect their understanding on time and angles.

• Arithmetic To indicate addition, the Babylonians just joined numbers together. To

indicate subtraction, they used the symbol . To indicate multiplication, they used a
complicated symbol . To divide by an integer a is to multiply by the reciprocal 1/a.
Square or cube root calculation relied on the tables. When the root was a whole
number, it was given exactly; otherwise, it was given approximately. How did they make
such a table? We do not know. From a problem about a rectangle with a diagonal, it
seems that the Babylonians used the approximate formula:
√ a 2 + b ≈ a + b/2a when b/a is very small.

• Algebra The Babylonians had more advanced knowledge about algebra than the
Egyptians. They used special terms and symbols to represent unknowns. For example,
one problem from a tablet was as follows:
“I have multiplied length and breadth and the area is 10. I have multiplied the
length by itself and have obtained an area. The excess of length over breadth I have
multiplied by itself and this result by 9. And this area is area obtained by multiplying the
length by itself. What are the length and breadth?”
By using today’s notation, the problem is
xy = 10,
9(x − y) 2 = x 2 . (x = the length, y = the breadth)
The algebraic problems were solved by describing only the steps required to execute
the solution, without reasoning.

• Geometry The Babylonians knew how to find areas for triangles and trapezoids,
and volumes for cylinders. The area of a circle was obtained by using 3 for π. From one
clay tablet, 15 sets of Pythagorean numbers were discovered by the Babylonians. There
was evidence that the Babylonians knew a relation between the side of a square and its
diagonal, which is a special case of the Pythagorean Theorem and was known at least
1000 years before Pythagoras.