Mesopotamian mathematics, seen “from the inside” (by assyriologists) and “from the outside” (by historians of mathematics)

Abstract

Since the 1950s, “Babylonian mathematics” has often served to open expositions of the general history of mathematics. Since it is written in a language and a script which only specialists understand, it has always been dealt with differently by the “insiders”, the Assyriologists who approached the texts where it manifests itself as philologists and historians of Mesopotamian culture, and by “outsiders”, historians of mathematics who had to rely on second-hand understanding of the material (actually, of as much of this material as they wanted to take into account), but who saw it as a constituent of the history of mathematics. The article deals with how these different approaches have looked in various periods: pre-decipherment speculations; the early period of deciphering, 1847–1929; the “golden decade”, 1929–1938, where workers with double competence (primarily Neugebauer and Thureau-Dangin) attacked the corpus and demonstrated the Babylonians to have possessed unexpectedly sophisticated mathematical knowledge; and the ensuing four decades, where some mopping-up without change of perspective was all that was done by a handful of Assyriologists and Assyriologically competent historians of mathematics, while most Assyriologists lost interest completely, and historians of mathematics believed to possess the definitive truth about the topic in Neugebauer ’s popularizations.