Late Babylonian Tables of Many-Place Regular Sexagesimal Numbers, from Babylon, Sippar, and Uruk

Book chapter, 2016

For the notion of many-place regular sexagesimal numbers, and for many explicit examples, both Old and Late Babylonian, the reader is referred to Friberg, MSCT 1 (2007), Sec. 1.4 and App. 9. In particular, it is important to recall that a sexagesimal number n is called “regular” if another sexagesimal number n´ can be found such that n times n´ equals some power of 60. (In Babylonian “relative” place value notation, every power of 60 is written as ‘1’.) The number n´ is called the “reciprocal” of n. In the following, it is conveniently referred to as rec. n.