Mathematics, metrology, and professional numeracy

Since the great decipherments of the 1930s and 1940s (Neugebauer 1935-37;Thureau-Dangin 1938; Neugebauer and Sachs 1945) Babylonia has had a welldeserved reputation as the home of the world’s first ‘true’ mathematics, in which abstract ideas and techniques were explored and developed with no immediate practical end in mind. It is commonly understood that the base 60 systems of time measurement and angular degrees have their ultimate origins in Babylonia, and that ‘Pythagoras’ theorem’ was known there a millennium before Pythagoras himself was supposed to have lived.