(a) Dating around 1800 BCE are tablets with multiplication and division tables, square- and square-root tables, and tables of compound interest. For Example- the square root of 2 was given as:1 + 24/60 + 51/602 + 10/603.
(b) Students had to solve problems such as the following: a field of area such and such is covered one finger deep in water; find out the volume of water.
(c) The division of the year into 12 months according to the revolution of the moon around the earth, the division of the month into four weeks, the day into 24 hours, and the hour into 60 minutes – all that we take for granted in our daily lives – has come to us from the Mesopotamians.
(d) Whenever solar and lunar eclipses were observed, their occurrence was noted according to year, month and day. So too there were records about the observed positions of stars and constellations in the night sky.
(e) of these momentous Mesopotamian achievements would have been possible without writing and the urban institution of schools, where students read and copied earlier written tablets, and where some boys were trained to become not record keepers for the administration, but intellectuals who could build on the work of their predecessor.
