Our detailed look at the history of mathematics will start in an area known as Mesopotamia (meso: 'between', potamia: 'rivers' -- between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers), in what are now the countries of Iraq, Syria, parts of Turkey and Kuwait. The area is sometimes called the 'fertile crescent' because the river systems flowing down to the Persian Gulf made agriculture and cities viable.
In accounts of mathematics history, the mathematics of Mesopotamia circa 3100 BCE - 300 BCE is usually called Babylonian mathematics. But if you look more carefully at the history of Mesopotamia in this period, there were several different peoples and nations that governed this region, including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians.
For our purposes, we will use the term 'Babylonian mathematics' to refer to the fairly unified mathematics traditions over this 3,000 year period (starting approximately 5,000 years ago).
Babylonian writing was done with a wedge-shaped reed stylus in wet clay tablets the size of a person's palm, and then dried in the sun or in a kiln. Their ingenious writing system was known as cuneiform: 'wedge-shaped', and it was possible to write words, numbers and other symbols with just these wedge-shaped forms. Because these baked clay tablets are very durable, we have many of them in museum collections to this day -- and quite a few of these seem to be teaching tablets for scribes learning mathematics to take government jobs in the Mesopotamian cities!
Here is an example of one of the existing mathematical clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. Your job is to figure out what is written here, and how the writing system for this mathematical tablet works!
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