Arithmetics

The prehistory of arithmetic is limited to a very small number of small artifacts indicating a clear conception of addition and subtraction, the best-known being the Ishango bone from central Africa, dating from somewhere between 20,000 and 18,000 BC. It is clear that the Babylonians had solid knowledge of almost all aspects of elementary arithmetic by 1800 BC, although historians can only guess at the methods utilized to generate the arithmetical results - as shown, for instance, in the clay tablet Plimpton 322, which appears to be a list of Pythagorean triples, but with no workings to show how the list was originally produced. Likewise, the Egyptian Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (dating from c. 1650 BC, though evidently a copy of an older text from c. 1850 BC) shows evidence of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division being used within a unit fraction system.