Ancient accounting in the modern mathematics classroom

Abstract

Florida State University owns a collection of twenty-five cuneiform tablets, acquired from Edgar J Banks in the 1920s. We describe their rediscovery, present an edition of one of them (a twenty-first century BC labour account from the Sumerian city of Umma), and discuss their potential for use in undergraduate mathematics education.1

¹We are very grateful to Steve Garfinkle, Denise Giannino, John Larson, Lucia Patrick, Plato L Smith II, and Giesele Towels for their help in the research and writing of this article.

Notes

¹We are very grateful to Steve Garfinkle, Denise Giannino, John Larson, Lucia Patrick, Plato L Smith II, and Giesele Towels for their help in the research and writing of this article.

²Retrieved on 11 July 2007 from http://www.fsu.edu/∼speccoll/other.htm

³ According to John Larson, archivist of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, the cost would translate into about $550 in 2006.

⁴ John Larson notes that from the documentation the Oriental Institute received from Banks' daughter, it has been determined that ‘Edgar J. Banks sold ancient cuneiform tablets and other antiquities in nearly every state in the Union’ (personal communication, 30 May 2007).

⁵Iraq had been created as a British Mandate nation in August 1921 from the former Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. On archaeology in Mandate Iraq see Bernhardsson (2005).

⁶ It is well known that Banks sold a large number of votive cones and tablets of Sîn-kašid (see for instance <http://www.oberlin.edu/library/news/observer16.17/cuneiform.html>). The first manifest gives a fanciful account of their allegedly gendered functions: while the rectangular tablet was ‘made by priests of the temple of the Goddess Ishtar and sold to the visiting female pilgrim, who presented it to the temple as an offering for the welfare of the king’ the ‘votive cone shaped phallic symbol [was] made by the temple priests, and sold to the male pilgrim, who thrust it into a hole between the bricks of the temple wall, as an offering to the king.’ ‘Thus a part of the temple income was derived.’ Does this represent Banks's considered interpretation, mere speculation, or calculated sales patter?