The Legacy of Writing While moving narratives can be transmitted orally, science requires written texts that generations of scholars can read and build upon. Perhaps the greatest legacy of Mesopotamia to the world is its scholarly tradition of time reckoning and mathematics. Dating around BCE are tablets with multiplication and division tables, square- and square-root tables, and tables of compound interest. The square root of was given as: + / + / + / If you work this out, you will find that the answer is .
41421296, only slightly different from the correct answer, .41421356. Students had to solve problems such as the following: a field of area such and such is covered one finger deep in water; find out the volume of water. The division of the year into months according to the revolution of the moon around the earth, the division of the month into four weeks, the day into hours, and the hour into minutes – all that we take for granted in our daily lives – has come to us from the Mesopotamians. These time divisions were adopted by the successors of Alexander and from there transmitted to the Roman world, then to the world of Islam, and then to medieval Europe (see Theme for how this happened).
Whenever solar and lunar eclipses were observed, their occurrence was noted according to year, month and day. So too there were records about the observed positions of stars and constellations in the night sky. W RITING AND C ITY L IFE T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY None of these momentous Mesopotamian achievements would have been possible without writing and the urban institution of schools, where students read and copied earlier written tablets, and where some boys were trained to become not record keepers for the administration, but intellectuals who could build on the work of their predecessors. We would be mistaken if we think that the preoccupation with the urban world of Mesopotamia is a modern phenomenon.
Let us look, finally, at two early attempts to locate and preserve the texts and traditions of the past.