Tablettes mathematiques de la collection Hilprecht.

• Author: Nemet-Nejat, Karen
• Position: Book review

Tablettes mathematiques de la collection Hilprecht. By CHRISTINE PROUST with the assistance of MANFRED KREBERNIK and JOACHIM OELSNER. Texte und Materialien der Hilprecht Collection, vol. 8. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2008. Pp. ix + 166, plates, CD-ROM. [euro]74.

Christine Proust begins her book by describing the historical background of the collection of texts at Jena and how these tablets came to be in Germany. At the end of the nineteenth century Hilprecht began as the director of excavations at Nippur for the University of Pennsylvania and later also for the University of Chicago. 871 mathematical tablets and fragments were found in what was described as the Temple Library. According to the laws of the Ottoman Empire, the tablets were divided between the excavators and the Empire. Thus, the tablets came to be in the University of Pennsylvania and Istanbul; in addition, Hilprecht retained some in his personal collection. Upon Hilprecht's death, his will bequeathed his collection to the University of Jena. Today the tablets are in the Babylonian collections of museums in Turkey (312), the United States (482), and Germany (79).

Hilprecht published some of the Old Babylon mathematical texts in an early attempt to understand this information: Mathematical, Metrological and Chronological Texts from the Library at Nippur (Philadelphia: Department of Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania, 1906). Abraham Sachs examined the mathematical tablets at the University of Pennsylvania and left a catalogue as to their size and brief information. (Erle Leichty kindly gave me a copy of Sach's work more than twenty years ago.) Otto Neugebauer later published some of these tablets, including fragments as mathematical problems: Mathematische Keilschrifttexte (Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1935-1937). Neugebauer and Sachs jointly published a catalogue of single multiplication tables and combined multiplication tables, mostly from the University of Pennsylvania and the Yale Babylonian Collection, which included tables in a catalogue format with remarks, problem texts, coefficient lists, and metric conversions: Mathematical Cuneiform Texts (New Haven: American Oriental Society and the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1945).

Proust discusses the paleo-Babylonian tablets and develops a typology based on the vocabulary of the ancient scribes rather than that of Assyriologists. The result is as follows: Type I are large tablets, which are sometimes...