Mathematical and Philological Insights on Cuneiform Texts. Neugebauer’s Correspondence with Fellow Assyriologists

Abstract

When reading an ancient text, we are deeply indebted to readings made previously by scholars who edited the texts and made them available. The process of decipherment, transliteration, translation, and commentary does not provide us with the raw material, but rather with interpretations of these texts. These reading keys are not always made explicit in the publications, but they appear more clearly in the editors’ working documents, such as drafts, letters, annotations or notebooks. In recent years, working documents produced and used by Otto Neugebauer when he was preparing the earliest editions of mathematical cuneiform texts became accessible to the researchers. The aim of this chapter is to show some aspects of the impact of Neugebauer’s work on our current understanding of cuneiform mathematics. The first part provides a brief overview of Neugebauer’s papers relating to mathematical cuneiform texts. The second part presents some examples showing how the works of Neugebauer and his close colleagues (mainly Goetze, Sachs and Thureau-Dangin) shaped the editions of cuneiform mathematics.