MS 3846

~1950 BCE·Old Babylonian·P252882

Not yet translated

This tablet is catalogued and photographed, but no published translation exists yet. Our translation engine works through the untranslated corpus every night, oldest first — this page will update the day its turn comes. If you are a specialist and can read it, we would love your help.

The world it comes from

Hammurabi, the Epic of Gilgamesh, mathematics.

Read the Old Babylonian chapter →

From the same catalogue range (near P252882)

P252879 · ~2550 BCE

CUSAS 35, 228

“6 nig2-lam2 suluh-garments 6 ib2-ba-du3 suluh-garments 4 nig2-la2(!) suluh-garments 1 du5-gi4 suluh-garment 13…”

P252873 · ~2400 BCE

CUSAS 35, 207

“21 minas of copper — Az, the overseer: 20½ [minas] — Lugal-hul 10½ [minas] — Lugal-nig-bara-du 4 [minas] — Lug…”

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Early Old Babylonian (ca. 2000-1900 BC) ?) — MS 3846. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).

Attribution

Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252882) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P252882..

Related tablets

Related sources

~1800 BCE

Plimpton 322

Whatever its purpose, this single tablet shows that Babylonian mathematicians, working in base-60, had an arithmetic understanding of right triangles a millennium before Pythagoras was born.