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Cuneiform mathematics
When, in the early 20th century, the assyriologist François Thureau-Dangin and, after him, the mathematician Otto Neugebauer undertook the systematic publication of cuneiform mathematical texts preserved in European and American museums, the scientific community discovered that highly sophisticated mathematical methods were developed in Mesopotamia more than one millennium before Euclid and Pythagoras.
The pages on mathematics of the cdli:wiki offers a brief general overview of the known mathematical cuneiform sources and a selected bibliography. Several more focused articles develop further some of the more important aspects of the mathematical traditions that have emerged in the Ancient Near East from the mi-third millennium to the end of the first millennium BCE.
Articles
The Sexagesimal Place Value Notation
Historiography of Cuneiform Mathematics
- 3rd millennium
Early Dynastic mathematical texts
Mathematics in the Ur III period
- 2nd millennium
Learning mathematics in Old Babylonian scribal schools
Old Babylonian mathematical traditions
- 1st millennium
Mathematical texts of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods
