You can see a map of the area.
They developed an abstract form of writing based on cuneiform (i.e. wedge-shaped) symbols. Their symbols were written on wet clay tablets which were baked in the hot sun and many thousands of these tablets have survived to this day. It was the use of a stylus on a clay medium that led to the use of cuneiform symbols since curved lines could not be drawn.
You can see one of their tablets.
Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the Babylonian's calculating skills was their construction of tables to aid calculation.
The Babylonians had an advanced number system, in some ways more advanced than our present system. It was a positional system with base 60 rather than the base 10 of our present system. Now 10 has only two proper divisors, 2 and 5. However 60 has 10 proper divisors so many more numbers have a finite form.
The Babylonians divided the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, each minute into 60 seconds. This form of counting has survived for 4000 years. To write 5h 25' 30", i.e. 5 hours, 25 minutes, 30 seconds is just to write the base 60 fraction, 5 25/60 30/3600 or as a base 10 fraction 5 4/10 2/100 5/1000 which we write as 5.425 in decimal notation.
Two tablets found at Senkerah on the Euphrates in 1854 date from 2000 BC. They give squares of the numbers up to 59 and cubes of the numbers up to 32. The table gives
One major disadvantage of the Babylonian system however was their lack of a zero. This meant that numbers did not have a unique representation but required the context to make clear whether 1 meant 1, 61, 3601, etc.
The Babylonians used the formula
Division is a harder process. The Babylonians did not have an algorithm for long division. Instead the based their method on the fact that
1/13 = 7/91 = 7.(1/91) =(approx) 7.(1/90)
and these values were given in the tables.
One of the Babylonian tablets (Plimpton 322) which is dated from between 1900 and 1600 BC contains answers to a problem containing Pythagorean triples, i.e. numbers a, b, c with a2 + b2 = c2. It is said to be the oldest number theory document in existence.
You can see a picture of this tablet.
A translation of another Babylonian tablet which is preserved in the British museum goes as follows
The Egyptians were very practical in their approach to mathematics.
You can see an example of Egyptian mathematics: the Rhind papyrus.
You can see a picture of another papyrus: the Moscow papyrus with a translation into hieroglyphics.
The Rhind papyrus is named after the Scottish Egyptologist A Henry Rhind, who purchased it in Luxor in 1858. The papyrus, a scroll about 6 metres long and 1/3 of a metre wide, was written around 1650 BC by the scribe Ahmes who is copying a document which is 200 years older. This makes the original papyrus and the Moscow papyrus both date from about 1850BC.
Unlike the Greeks who thought abstractly about mathematical ideas, the Egyptians were only concerned with practical arithmetic. In fact the Egyptians probably did not think of numbers as abstract quantities but always thought of a specific collection of 8 objects when 8 was mentioned. To overcome the deficiencies of their system of numerals the Egyptians devised cunning ways round the fact that their numbers were unsuitable for multiplication as is shown in the Rhind papyrus which date from about 1700 BC.
The the Rhind papyrus recommends that multiplication be done in the following way. Assume that we want to multiply 41 by 59. Take 59 and add it to itself, then add the answer to itself and continue:-
41 - 32 = 9, 9 - 8 = 1, 1 - 1 = 0
to see that 41 = 32 + 8 + 1. Next check the numbers in the right hand column corresponding to 32, 8, 1 and add them.
82 = 1 4 which stands for
82 = 1 4 = 1.60 + 4 = 64
and so on up
to 592 = 58 1 (= 58.60 +1 =3481).
ab = ((a + b)2 - a2 - b2)/2
to make multiplication easier. Even better is the formula
ab = (a + b)2/4 - (a - b)2/4
which shows that a table of squares is all that is necessary to multiply numbers, simply taking the difference of two numbers that were looked up in the table.
a.b = a.(1/b)
so what was necessary was a table of reciprocals. We still have their reciprocal tables going up to the reciprocals of numbers up to several billion. Of course the tables are in their number notation, but translating into our notation, but leaving the base as 60, the beginning of one of their tables would look like
2 30
3 20
4 15
5 12
6 10
8 7 30
9 6 40
10 6
12 5
15 4
16 3 45
18 3 20
20 3
24 2 30
25 2 24
27 2 13 20
Now the table had gaps in it since 1/7, 1/11, 1/13, etc. do not have terminating base 60 fractions. This did not mean that the Babylonians could not compute 1/13, say. They would write
4 is the length and 5 the diagonal. What is the breadth? Its size is not known. 4 times 4 is 16. 5 times 5 is 25. You take 16 from 25 and there remains 9. What times what shall I take in order to get 9? 3 times 3 is 9. 3 is the breadth.
The Egyptians and the Romans had number systems which were not well suited for arithmetical calculations. Addition of Roman numerals is not too bad but multiplication is essentially impossible. The Egyptian system had similar drawbacks.
41 59
______________
1 59
2 118
4 236
8 472
16 944
32 1888
______________
Since 64 > 41, there is no need to go beyond the 32 entry. Now go through a number of subtractions
59
______________
1 59 X
2 118
4 236
8 472 X
16 944
32 1888 X
______________
2419
Notice that the multiplication is achieved with only additions, notice also that this is a very early use of binary arithmetic. Reversing the factors we have
59 41
______________
1 41 X
2 82 X
4 16
8 328 X
16 656 X
32 1312 X
_______________
2419