(Article II.6.) State, “Justice”, Scribal Culture and Mathematics in Ancient Mesopotamia. Sarton Lecture 2008

The functioning of the modern state presupposes a variety of mathematical technologies – accounting, statistics, and much more. Mathematics, on its part, needs the institutions of the state (schools, universities, research institutions, etc.) to secure financing, recruitment and the rearing of competence. At a given moment, the state as well as mathematics largely take the partner “as it is”, and none of them appears to the immediate view to depend for its essence on the other. At the moment of pristine state formation, the situation was different. Most pristine state structures depended on organized violence, on religious institutions, etc., and mathematics did not enter. At least one major exception to this rule can be found, however: the earliest “proto-literate” state formation in Mesopotamia of the late fourth millennium, intimately connected to a system of accounting that seems to have guaranteed an apparent continuation of pre-state “just redistribution”. Both for its functioning and its legitimization, the state depended on the mathematics of accounting. On its part, the kind of mathematics that was created was totally bound up with its administrative role. The lecture follows the interaction of state, “justice”, mathematics and scribal profession from the late fourth millennium over the “Ur III” period (21st century bce, culmination and apparently end of the intertwinement of statal structure and legitimization with mathematics) until the Assyrian empire of the earlier first millennium.