Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History

Chapter one: Scope, methods, sources -- 1.1 The subject: ancient Iraq and its mathematics -- 1.2 the artefacts: Assyriological and mathematical analysis -- 1.3 The contexts: textuality, materiality, and social history -- Chapter two: Before the mid-third millennium -- 2.1 Background and evidence -- 2.2 Quantitative management and emerging statehood -- 2.3 Enumeration and abstraction -- 2.4 Symmetry, geometry, and visual culture -- Chapter three: The later third millennium -- 3.1 Background and evidence -- 3.2 Maps, plans, and itineraries: visual and textual representations of spatial relationships -- 3.3 Accounting for time and labour: approximation, standardisation, prediction -- 3.4 The development of the sexagesimal place value system (spvs) -- Chapter four: The early second millennium -- 4.1 Background and evidence -- 4.2 Metrology, multiplication, memorisation: elementary mathematics education -- 4.3 Words and pictures, reciprocals and squares -- 4.4 Measurement, justice, and the ideology of kingship -- Chapter five: Assyria -- 5.1 Background and evidence -- 5.2 Palatial and mercantile numeracy in early Assyria -- 5.3 Counting heads, marking time: quantifications in royal inscriptions and records -- 5.4 Aru: number manipulation in Neo-Assyrian scholarship -- Chapter six: The later second millennium -- 6.1 Background and evidence -- 6.2 Tabular accounting in southern Babylonia -- 6.3 Land surveyors and their records in northern Babylonia -- 6.4 Quantification as literary device in the epic of Gilgames -- Chapter seven: The early first millennium -- 7.1 Background and evidence -- 7.2 Libraries and schools: the formalisation of the first-millennium scribal curriculum -- 7.3 Home economics: numeracy in a mid-first-millennium urban household -- 7.4 Measuring houses, maintaining professionalism -- Chapter eight: The later first millennium -- 8.1 Background and evidence -- 8.2 Babylon: mathematics in the service of astronomy? -- 8.3 Achaemenid Uruk: the Sangu-Ninurta and Ekur-zkir families -- 8.4 Seleucid Uruk: the Hunzu and Sin-leqi-unninni families -- Chapter nine: Epilogue -- 9.1 The big picture: three millennia of mathematics in ancient Iraq -- 9.2 Ancient mathematics in the modern world -- 9.3 Inside ancient mathematics: translation, representation, interpretation -- 9.4 The worlds of ancient mathematics: history, society, community -- Appendix a: Metrological systems -- Appendix b: Published mathematical tablets.