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If the cost of digging a trench is 9 gin, and the trench has a length of 5 ninda and is one-half ninda deep, and if a worker's daily load of earth costs 10 gin to move, and his daily wages are 6 se of silver, then how wide is the canal?
Ancient Babylonians Were No Slouches When It Came To Math
Seeded on Sun Nov 28, 2010 2:17 PM EST
Article Source: The New York Times- Enjoy this article? Help vote it up the 'Vine.
- Public Discussion (5)
(Spoiler alert)
“Solution: Multiply the length and the depth, and you get 30. Take the reciprocal of the workload, multiply by 30 and you will get 3. Multiply the wages by 3, and you will get 6. Take the reciprocal of 6, and multiply it by 9, the total cost in silver, and you will get its width. One and a half ninda is the width. Such is the procedure.”
(A reciprocal in Babylonian arithmetic is in relation to 60, so the reciprocal of 10 is 6.)
Well, of course... now that you explain it. That part about the reciprocal of 10 is 6 really threw me but then of course their system used a base of 60, not ten.
- 4 votes
#1 - Sun Nov 28, 2010 7:32 PM EST
Fascinating stuff, thanks for this. The development of mathematics must have a long, arduous and interesting history.
- 6 votes
#2 - Mon Nov 29, 2010 9:30 AM ESTIn Babylonia and Egypt, the underlying reality is that if you pay the laborer six pieces of silver a day then 2 or 3 of the coins will go for beer and maybe the rest to feed the family. Even poor women understood that math.
- 1 vote
#3 - Mon Nov 29, 2010 1:16 PM ESTIn other words half their money went for wine women and song and the rest they just wasted?
- 2 votes
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