Why Beauty is Truth Read Free Page B

have to be a genius to deduce that the unknown number is thirty. Or it may be much harder: “I multiply a number by itself and add 25: the result is ten times the number. What is the number we seek?” Trial and error may lead you to the answer 5—but trial and error is an inefficient way to answer puzzles, to solve equations. What if we change 25 to 23, for example? Or 26? The Babylonian mathematicians disdained trial and error, for they knew a much deeper, more powerful secret. They knew a rule, a standard procedure, to solve such equations. As far as we know, they were the first people to realize that such techniques existed.

    The mystique of Babylon stems in part from numerous Biblical references. We all know the story of Daniel in the lion’s den, which is set in Babylon during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar. But in later times, Babylon became almost mythical, a city long vanished, destroyed beyond redemption, that perhaps had never existed. Or so it seemed until roughly two hundred years ago.
    For thousands of years, strange mounds had dotted the plains of what we now call Iraq. Knights returning from the Crusades brought back souvenirs dragged from the rubble—decorated bricks, fragments of undecipherable inscriptions. The mounds were clearly the ruins of ancient cities, but beyond that, little was known.
    In 1811, Claudius Rich made the first scientific study of the rubble mounds of Iraq. Sixty miles south of Baghdad, beside the Euphrates, he surveyed the entire site of what he soon determined must be the remains of Babylon, and hired workmen to excavate the ruins. The finds included bricks, cuneiform tablets, beautiful cylinder seals that produced raised words and pictures when rolled over wet clay, and works of art so majestic that whoever carved them must be ranked alongside Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
    Even more interesting, however, were the smashed cuneiform tablets that littered the sites. We are fortunate that those early archaeologists recognized their potential value, and kept them safe. Once the writing had been deciphered, the tablets became a treasure-trove of information about the lives and concerns of the Babylonians.
    The tablets and other remains tell us that the history of ancient Mesopotamia was lengthy and complex, involving many different cultures and states. It is customary to employ the word “Babylonian” to refer to them all, as well as to the specific culture that was centered upon the city of Babylon. However, the heart of Mesopotamian culture moved repeatedly, with Babylon both coming into, and falling out of, favor. Archaeologists divide Babylonian history into two main periods. The Old Babylonian period runs from about 2000 to 1600 BCE, and the Neo-Babylonian period runs from 625 to 539 BCE. In between are the Old Assyrian, Kassite, Middle Assyrian, and Neo-Assyrian periods, when Babylon was ruled by outsiders. Moreover, Babylonian mathematics continued in Syria, throughout the period known as Seleucid, for another five hundred years or more.
    The culture itself was much more stable than the societies in which it resided, and it remained mostly unchanged for some 1200 years, sometimes temporarily disrupted by periods of political upheaval. So any particular aspect of Babylonian culture, other than some specific historical event, probably came into existence well before the earliest known record. In particular, there is evidence that certain mathematical techniques, whose first surviving records date to around 600 BCE, actually existed far earlier. For this reason, the central character in this chapter—an imaginary scribe to whom I shall give the name Nabu-Shamash and whom we have already met during his early training in the brief vignette about three school friends—is deemed to have lived sometime around 1100 BCE, being born during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar I.
    All the other characters that we will meet as our tale progresses were