Practice and Profession. Everyday mathematics and their transmission in Mesopotamia and Egypt
Résumé
The mathematics we use today has its roots in Antiquity and, in various aspects, more specifically in Near Eastern antiquity. Their inventors and practitioners have left textsonly a small portion of which have survived to datethat reflect their knowledge and the practice they made of mathematics. However, these texts are unevenly distributed in time and space, partly because of their more or less durable medium. In Mesopotamia and surrounding areas, more than a million cuneiform texts, for the great majority written on clay tablets, but also on stones or other media, have been discovered. They cover more than three millennia from the end of the 4 th millennium BCE to the first century CE and were found in a very large area from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf and Iran, from Anatolia to Egypt (El Amarna). Some sites have produced only a few tablets, while others dozens of thousands of them. About a dozen languages have used the cuneiform script, the main ones being Sumerian and Akkadian. Assyriologists consider that about 2,000 of these texts have a mathematical content, most of them were found in an educational context. But dozens of thousands of other clay tablets linked to the administration of palaces and temples or to private economic activities contain quantifications and computations and thus may be linked to the practice of mathematics. During roughly the same period in Egypt, besides monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions engraved or painted on the walls, surviving texts are written in Hieratic and Demotic, mainly on papyri and ostraca. Ostraca are numerous from the middle of the second millennium and on; there are almost 10,000 ostraca written in Demotic. Papyri hardly survived time compared to clay tablets, and we count about as many of Egyptian Hieratic papyri as cuneiform mathematical texts. For the first millennium, there are a little less than 5,000 papyri written in Demotic. Taking apart the ostraca, for which there is no evaluation of the number of texts with a mathematical content, the corpus of Egyptian mathematical texts represents about one per cent of the Mesopotamian one. This disproportion in the available sources is reflected in this chapter which focuses on Mesopotamia with some hints about mathematical practices in Egypt. Such a little number of mathematical texts might be explained by the fact that the context of discovery of the Egyptian papyri is limited to graves and temples.
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