![]() A helpful notation has been devised by Otto Neugebauer. It follows that there is a translation problem even in the task of finding equivalents in our system for what the Babylonian scribe wrote down. (You saw an example earlier, in the ma-na to gin to se ratios of our first problem.) In dating, weights and measures, economic records and the like, there seems to have been a wide mixture of units with many local variations. This system was used consistently only within mathematics, as far as we know. Also he would have needed to have kept his wits about him in doing addition or subtraction, where the places need to be lined up correctly. We presume that, in any case where the absolute value of the number was significant, this would be clear to the scribe from the context. This approach completely sidesteps the relatively cumbersome Egyptian technique of handling fractional parts, and, together with the use of multiplication tables, leads arguably to computations even smoother than our own (at least before pocket calculators). This makes life hard for us in reading the tablets initially, but seems to have given the Babylonians unprecedented flexibility in calculations, because, among other things, there was no symbolic distinction between ‘whole numbers' and ‘fractions’. ![]() Although what we notice first is that it was a place-value system (see Box 1), what is perhaps more striking is the coupling of this feature with a ‘floating sexagesimal point’ that is, the lack of any indication about the absolute value of the number. ![]() It is worth spelling out the reasons for this judgement. The Babylonian numeral system was described in Section 3 as ‘remarkable’.
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