World's Oldest Decimal Multiplication Table Discovered

ananyo writes "From a few fragments out of a collection of 23-century-old Chinese bamboo strips, historians have pieced together what they say is the world's oldest example of a multiplication table in base 10. Each strip is about 7 to 12 millimeters wide and half a meter long, and has a vertical line of ancient Chinese calligraphy painted on it in black ink. The bamboo pieces constitute 65 ancient texts and are thought to be among the most important artifacts from the Warring States period before the unification of China. But 21 bamboo strips contained only numbers and, on closer inspection, turned out to be a multiplication table. As in a modern multiplication table, the entries at the intersection of each row and column in the matrix provide the results of multiplying the corresponding numbers. The table can also help users to multiply any whole or half integer between 0.5 and 99.5. The researchers suspect that officials used the multiplication table to calculate surface area of land, yields of crops and the amounts of taxes owed."

Comments

The ancients

[cold fjord]

It is fascinating that we continue to find artifacts from the ancient world that show far more sophistication that people today generally realize. This finding is one. The Antikythera Mechanism is another. I recently read a fascinating article about ancient Roman military medicine which was so advanced that it was not equaled in some ways until the 1900s. I have little doubt that there is much more to be found. Our ancestors could be quite astonishing in their abilities, and very human in their flaws.

Re:The ancients

[cusco]

The Incas (and other Mesoamerican peoples) were doing BRAIN SURGERY before the arrival of the Spanish barbarians. Their style of warfare was to incapacitate the enemy soldiers, then heal them, because what was the purpose of taking over territory if there was no one left to work the land? The weaponry was mostly clubs and slings of various types, which created a lot of head injuries and broken bones that were then healed so that the ex-soldiers could go back to the fields. They really didn't understand the Spanish when they came and killed, and killed, and killed everything that moved. They didn't have the historical background of the glorious Age of Chivalry, where if a European lordling had designs on a neighbors territory he sent his mercenaries to kill all the neighbors peasants, so that there was no one to take in the harvest and the neighbor's mercenaries would defect when he couldn't pay them. In contrast most of the participants of an Incan battle survived, a bit worse for wear but alive and able to work.

Re:China, it figures...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And who's surprised it wasn't found in Africa?

I, for one, would be really surprised if an ancient Chinese multiplication table were discovered in Africa.

Re:China, it figures...

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Well, those primitive African tribes went far beyond that. They invented fractals.