1.5.2 What is the significance of the numbers? In seeking the significance of these numbers, there is more information on the tablet that we have not yet taken into account, namely the text of the column headings themselves. The heading of column A is partly destroyed, but the text headings for B and C are clearer. B says something like ‘ib-sa of the front’, and C ‘ib-sa of the diagonal’, where ib-sa is a Sumerian word whose significance here is not precisely known. The geometrical
1.4 A remarkable numeration system The Babylonian numeral system was described in Section 3 as ‘remarkable’. It is worth spelling out the reasons for this judgement. Although what we notice first is that it was a place-value system (see Box 1), what is perhaps more striking is the coupling of this feature with a ‘floating sexagesimal point’; that is, the lack of any indication about the absolute value of the number. This makes life hard for us in reading the tablets initially, but seems to have given the Babylonians un
1 Babylonian mathematics In Mesopotamia, the scribes of Babylon and the other big cities were impressing on clay tablets economic and administrative records, literary, religious and scientific works, word-lists, and mathematical problems and tables. Nearly all of the texts that give us our fullest understanding of Babylonian mathematics—indeed, of any mathematics before the Greeks—date from about 1800—1600 BC. During this period, King Hammurabi unified Mesopotamia out of a rabble of small city-states into an em
Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: know something about cuneiform how it was used to represent numbers for mathematical problem solving and computation; understand the relationship between a decimal place-value system and a sexagesimal one; appreciate the advanced understanding of mathematics in Ancient Mesopotamia in relation to anyone in medieval Christian Europe 3000 years later.
6 Conclusion William Wilberforce died on 29 July 1833, two days after hearing that the legislation for the abolition of slavery in British dominions had successfully completed its passage through the House of Commons, a fitting conclusion to the work he had begun nearly half a century before. The Practical View both reflected and contributed to a major shift in religious consciousness of which the continuing growth of the Evangelical movement was the most striking manifestation. Methodist num
4.1 The impact of A Practical View
A Practical View is significant both as a kind of ‘manifesto’ by a prominent figure in a religious movement of rapidly expanding influence, and as part of an ongoing process of reflection on the state of British politics and society in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Wilberforce had been working on it intermittently for four years before its eventual publication on 12 April 1797. As a busy politician he struggled to find the time for sustained writing. He had initially had
2 Britain and the French Revolution In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Edmund Burke (1729–97) made clear his hostile reaction to the Revolution, which he perceived as a dangerous destruction of tradition and continuity in favour of abstract Enlightenment principles. On the other hand, there was a substantial cross-section of British opinion that initially warmly welcomed the Revolution, including Wilberforce himself, as well as much more radical individuals, such as Thomas Paine (1737–1809). Init
1.2 Upbringing; MP for Yorkshire William Wilberforce (Figure 1) was born in Hull, the son and grandson of substantial merchants who had made their fortune in trade between Yorkshire and the Baltic. His father died in 1768 and he subsequently went to live for a period with his uncle and aunt. Through them he was exposed not only to the influence of John Newton, but also to that
References 5.1 The reception of Hume's views ‘Of suicide’ was received with the same degree of public hostility as his essay on immortality. Here is what an anonymous reviewer of the 1777 posthumous edition of both essays had to say in the Monthly Review (1784, vol. 70, pp. 427–8): Were a drunken libertine to throw out such nauseous stuff in the presence of his Bacchanalian companions, there might be some excuse for him; but were any man to advan 4.1 Why was our immortality an issue? When reading about Hume's death you may have been puzzled as to why people became so worked up about Hume's attitude. The question of what, if anything, happens after death is something most of us are at least curious about, just as most of us are curious to know what we will be doing in a few years’ time. But curiosity cannot explain the venom evident in the condemnations of Hume. The reason for the hostility can be approached by considering the opera Don Giovanni. The opera i 7.1 The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Britain and Europe Je suis tombé par terre, C'est la faute à Voltaire; Le nez dans le ruisseau, C'est la faute à Rousseau [I've tumbled to the ground thanks to Voltaire; With my nose in the brook, thanks to Rousseau] So ran a ditty popular after the Revolution, which blamed it on Voltaire and Rousseau. 6 The Thermidorian Settlement and the end of the Revolution In Thermidor (July) 1794 there was a further political coup, this time engineered by deputies in the Convention who felt that Jacobin fanaticism, mob violence and bloodshed had got wildly out of hand and feared for their own lives. They succeeded in outmanoeuvring Robespierre, who was arrested and (after a botched suicide attempt) guillotined together with over 100 other Jacobins. The Thermidorians then put a stop to show trials and bloodletting. They also called in the army to put dow 5.3 The Marseillaise During the Revolutionary Wars, as Robespierre insisted, ‘republican enthusiasm must be exalted by all means possible’. The Jacobins encouraged a revolutionary solidarity and patriotism, expressed in the slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. The Marseillaise began as the ‘battle-hymn of the army of the Rhine’, composed by Rouget de Lisle in April 1792 immediately after France declared war on Francis of Austria. It acquired its name when a battalion of volunteers from Marse 3.2 Popular violence and the Revolution The deputies were concerned to protect property and maintain order (as the 1790 decree on the abolition of nobility suggests) in the face of a growing breakdown of public order; and their attitude to the masses – to what the demagogic journalist Jean-Paul Marat (1744–93) called le petit peuple (the little people), the millions of propertyless, distressed, violent and unpredictable ‘fellow citizens’ – was one of growing apprehension. The people traditionally rioted when bread 2.3 Fall of the Bastille, 14 July 1789 In a similar mood of aggrieved self-righteousness and revolutionary exultation came the fall of the Bastille, the medieval fortress and prison of Paris, on 14 July 1789. A catastrophic harvest in 1788 had provoked food riots in Paris and elsewhere. Louis XVI, alarmed both by this unrest and by the unexpected belligerence of the Third Estate, called troops into Paris to maintain order. It was feared that he also aimed to suppress the National Assembly, which rallied its supporters. The Parisia 1.8 Conflict and tension The management of a site such as Aberdulais Falls by its very nature highlights conflicting interests and tensions. Some relate to problems caused by the decision-making process itself, which can be slow and has to accommodate a range of interests of the various client bodies. For example, when a new information centre was to be built on the site, the client bodies involved in making decisions about its overall appearance, form and fabric were: the National Trust Planning Committee, the Acknowledgements The material acknowledged below is Proprietary (not subject to Creative Commons licensing) and used under licence. See terms and conditions. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following: Figure 1 Bodleian Library; Figure 2 Keele University, Turner Collection; Figure 7 Deutsches Museum, Munich. The material acknowledged below is contained in The History of Mathematics – A Reader (1987) J Fauvel and 2.5 Is the author dead? When Roland Barthes (1915–80) wrote ‘The Death of the Author’ (first published 1968, reprinted in Barthes 1977), he did not mean that, like Wimsatt and Beardsley, the author had been, or should always have been, absent in the interpretation of art works. Instead his position is a historicised one: while once it might have been acceptable to refer to the author in the interpretation of an art work, now, in a post-modern world, it is not. Michel Foucault (1926–84) responded to Barthes ( 2.1 ‘Every painter paints himself’? Art history methods of biography or ‘Life’ writing attempt to link an artist to his art. Why do we need to know about an artist's life to know about his art in the first place? Why might Helen Langdon want to explain Caravaggio the man and not just his world or his art? Behind this questions lies a problem central to art history. Do we need to know about artists to know about their art? Martin Kemp gives the link between an artist and his art a historical comple
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