4 ms·

Wow, maybe a more obscure question, what drives this problem solving at that day and age?

• jareklupinski 3y ago
  if I was a palace vizier, it might be helpful to know when people serving a king have imbalances / debts that can be exploited by others
• kdamica 3y ago
  Not sure about this particular text, but much of the earliest writing we have is record-keeping for taxes. You could definitely imagine this kind of math being important for tax collectors to learn, since they would typically travel around to collect taxes at some interval, and would have to calculate the amounts on the fly.
  • burkaman 3y ago
    Yeah these could be very literal problems. The first seems useful for assessing the value of a taxable asset, and the second for paying back a loan or a penalty over time.
• carapace 3y ago
  Math. (As in, math is it's own motivation to some minds.) These read to me like very abstract problems cast into everyday (for that time) language to make the concepts more approachable. Like "word problems" today the situations described would be apocryphal.