Another Old Babylonian school text similarly stresses how mathematical knowledge
and numeracy were part of a well-rounded education. But the text, which we call
Shulgi B, a royal hymn of the third millennium ruler, was quite possibly originally
commissioned by that king himself. According to his self-praise,I, Sˇulgi the noble, have been blessed with a favorable destiny right from the womb.
When I was small, I was at the academy, where I learned the scribal art from the
tablets of Sumer and Akkad. None of the nobles could write on clay as I could.
There where people regularly went for tutelage in the scribal art, I qualified fully in
subtraction, addition, reckoning and accounting.... I am an experienced scribe
who does not neglect a thing.^13Since we have little information on schooling prior to the Old Babylonian period,
the most we can do is retroject and surmise that third millennium scribal students
probably also had a strong mathematical component to their schooling.
One of the most basic things that a scribe entering into an administrative capacity
had to learn was how to date a tablet, that is, to calculate the passage of time. This then
brings us to the second half our investigation: calendars of the third millennium BC.
TIME
Like a clock, a calendar is a means of counting time. We count time in seconds,
minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and finally, eras. Here we shall consider, in
turn, years, months, leap years, and whether a week existed in ancient Babylonian
thought. Finally we will touch upon calendrical oddities and reforms. Because count-
ing time, particularly years (but also months) was political, third millennium calendri-
cal systems varied from place to place and time to time. Thus, we see a hodge-podge
of third millennium calendrical systems, a contrast to the seemingly orderly progres-
sion of mathematical achievement occurring contemporaneously.CALENDARS
Ancient Babylonian calendars differ from modern Western ones in many ways. We
begin a year of 365 days in the winter and have a set calendar in which the number of
months in the year and the order of the months are immutable; further, we calculate
years sequentially in a BCor ADsystem. The current conception of the year beginning
on January 1 in the ADor BCsystem is surprisingly modern.^14Year names
It would have been convenient for us if Babylonians had a fixed starting point and had
reckoned the years sequentially after that (e.g., one could imagine something like year
52 since Sargon united the land), but Sumerians did not in fact use a sequential
numbering of years over centuries, or even over the span of a dynasty. In fact, for most
of the third millennium, years were named, not numbered. Scribes kept lists of the year
names, allowing us to order them when we have the lists. But for a number of kings,
even very important ones like Naram-Sin or Ur-Namma, year name lists are now lost.–– Calendars and counting ––