Mathematical Cuneiform Tablets. The history of mathematics begins with ancient Babylonian mathematics recovered by modern scholars from cuneiform texts. These texts are plentiful and can be found in museums, collections, and libraries all over the world. They are the product of the Mesopotamian scribal schools, where mathematics was an intrinsic part of the curriculum. Whereas surviving astronomical tablets come almost exclusively from just three sites—Nineveh, Babylon, and Uruk—mathematical cuneiform texts come from many different locations across Mesopotamia. With the exception of a small number of school exercise texts from the late third millennium B.C.E., most mathematical tablets fall into two periods of Mesopotamian history. The earlier group comes from the Old Babylonian scribal schools of the first half of the second millennium B.C.E., and the later texts were composed by the Late Babylonian scholars working...