{
  "author": "ChronologiaOS editorial guides",
  "date": "2026-10-09",
  "department": "Mathematics & Measurement",
  "department_id": "NUMBERS",
  "epistemic_label": "Source guide",
  "epistemic_status": "SOURCE_GUIDE",
  "period": "7th century BCE",
  "place": "Kouyunjik, Nineveh, Iraq",
  "public_sources": [
    {
      "publisher": "British Museum",
      "title": "Mathematical reciprocal table K.2069",
      "type": "Museum object record",
      "url": "https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-2069"
    }
  ],
  "publication_state": "PUBLIC",
  "read_time": "3 min read",
  "sections": [
    {
      "body": "The British Museum's record for K.2069 describes a Neo-Assyrian mathematical reciprocal table from Kouyunjik, the mound of Nineveh, dated to the seventh century BCE. Reciprocal tables listed the numbers needed to turn division into multiplication in the sexagesimal system.",
      "heading": "Start with the tablet",
      "source": 0
    },
    {
      "body": "The research record treats the tablet as strong material evidence for reciprocal-table computation at that date, and adds that wider claims about continuity from earlier Babylonian traditions require explicit transmission evidence. The practice is older; this tablet proves it was alive in seventh-century Nineveh.",
      "heading": "An artifact date is not an origin date"
    },
    {
      "body": "Compare this tablet with Plimpton 322, more than a thousand years older. What would you need to connect them: shared number formats, identical table layouts, or a documented scribal lineage?",
      "heading": "Try the research habit"
    },
    {
      "body": "A library tablet can be a reference copy, a school exercise, or an archival curiosity. Which features of the object itself would tell you which?",
      "heading": "A question to carry forward"
    }
  ],
  "short_title": "How did Assyrian scribes divide?",
  "slug": "k-2069-a-reciprocal-table-from-the-library-at-nineveh",
  "summary": "A seventh-century tablet from Nineveh lists reciprocals for sexagesimal arithmetic. Learn why the date of an artifact is not the date of the mathematics on it.",
  "tags": [
    "Nineveh",
    "Reciprocal table",
    "Sexagesimal",
    "Assyria",
    "Clay tablets"
  ],
  "title": "K.2069: a reciprocal table from the library at Nineveh."
}