Quantifying the Past: Insights from Mathematics and Accounting in the Ancient Near East
This presentation explores the proto-Elamite and proto-cuneiform corpora through the lenses of mathematics and accounting. We discuss the challenges associated with interpreting ambiguous numeral notations in these documents, and demonstrate applications of digital tools to make our analyses of these notations more efficient and thorough. Our explorations reveal discrepancies which prompt a reassessment of existing hypotheses about certain sign meanings, and uncover mistakes or inconsistencies which appear to offer insights into the original scribes' understandings of their numeration and writing systems. Descriptive surveys of the numeric content in both corpora provide insights into higher-level patterns, illuminating similarities and differences in the associated accounting traditions. Motivated by the sheer amount of numeric information in both corpora, we argue that a thorough understanding of these texts requires a nuanced comprehension of their numeric content, which this work aims to contribute.
