Agathe Keller

Christine Proust

Karine Chemla

This book sheds light on the variety of mathematical cultures in general. To do so, it concentrates on cultures of computation and quantification in the ancient world, mainly in ancient China, South Asia, and the Ancient Near East and offers case studies focused on numbers, quantities, and operations, in particular in relation to mathematics as well as administrative and economic activities. The various chapters focus on the different ways and contexts of shaping numbers and quantities, and on the procedures applied to them. The book places special emphasis on the processes of emergence of place-value number systems, evidenced in the three geographical areas under study All these features yield essential elements that will enable historians of mathematics to further capture the diversity of computation practices in their contexts, whereas previous historical approaches have tended to emphasize elements that displayed uniformity within “civilizational” blocks. The book includes editions and translations of texts, some of them published here for the first time, maps, and conventions for editions of ancient texts. It thereby offers primary sources and methodological tools for teaching and learning. The volume is aimed at historians and philosophers of science and mathematics, historians of the ancient worlds, historians of economics, sinologists, indologists, assyriologists, as well as undergraduate, graduate students and teachers in mathematics, the history and philosophy of science and mathematics, and in the history of ancient worlds.

Numbers, Measurements, and Operations in Documents from Mesopotamia, China and South Asia

Cultures of Computation and Quantification in the Ancient World

Alain Bernard

This book examines the textual, social, cultural, practical and institutional environments to which the expression “teaching and learning contexts” refers. It reflects on the extent to which studying such environments helps us to better understand ancient or modern sources, and how notions of “teaching” and “learning” are to be understood. Tackling two problems: the first, is that of certain sources of scientific knowledge being studied without taking into account the various “contexts” of transmission that gave this knowledge a long-lasting meaning. The second is that other sources are related to teaching and learning activities, but without being too precise and demonstrative about the existence and nature of this “teaching context”. In other words, this book makes clear what is meant by “context” and highlights the complexity of the practice hidden by the words “teaching” and “learning”. Divided into three parts, the book makes accessible teaching and learning situations, presents comparatist approaches, and emphasizes the notion of teaching as projects embedded in coherent treatises or productions.

Scientific Sources and Teaching Contexts Throughout History: Problems and Perspectives

John Steele

This volume explores how scholars wrote, preserved, circulated, and read knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia. It offers an exercise in micro-history that provides a case study for attempting to understand the relationship between scholars and scholarship during this time of great innovation. The papers in this collection focus on tablets written in the city of Uruk in southern Babylonia. These archives come from two different scholarly contexts. One is a private residence inhabited during successive phases by two families of priests who were experts in ritual and medicine. The other is the most important temple in Uruk during the late Achemenid and Hellenistic periods. The contributors undertake detailed studies of this material to explore the scholarly practices of individuals, the connection between different scholarly genres, and the exchange of knowledge between scholars in the city and scholars in other parts of Babylonia and the Greek world. In addition, this collection examines the archives in which the texts were found and the scribes who owned or wrote them. It also considers the interconnections between different genres of knowledge and the range of activities of individual scribes. In doing so, it answers questions of interest not only for the study of Babylonian scholarship but also for the study of ancient Mesopotamian textual culture more generally, and for the study of traditions of written knowledge in the ancient world.

Christine Proust

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