Talk:Si.427

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Daniel.mansfield (talk · contribs)

Preserve

@Infinity Knighty: Good return of material deleted, afaics, solely in order to make a point. The author himself (who for the record, I do not know and have never heard of until the current brouhaha) has himself attempted to fix an error reported in RS and that was completely overlooked by the remover.Selfstudier (talk) 11:21, 10 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

On the sources

"It is the only known example of a cadastral document from the OB period" is a direct lift from a press release widely copied around the internet. Is there a source for this claim aside from Mansfield, whose work the press release covers? It is a very strong claim, and surely it would have been remarked on in the nearly 120 years since the tablet's discovery, when it was originally classified as being about surveying.

I also fail to see how the citation to the unpublished index of names by Ferwerda and Woestenburg is a relevant citation for the meaning of the number 25,29 — especially when I cannot find that number in their document. The name Sîn-bēl-apli does, and their entire entry reads

"f. Sin-bel-aplim, Ilan-šemea^, Di.680A,10'+seal^ (Si7) (a); Di.700,31+seal (Si21) (a); MHET II,3: 455,27 (b)+A,8" (Si30)"

Without this apparently irrelevant reference to Ferwerda and Woestenburg, I will note without comment that of the 7 remaining references, three are by Mansfield, and one is a news article about his work. I understand that there are tablets of this nature that are very little studied, and so specifics on this one may be rather rare. But surely there are good general sources that could and indeed should be cited, particularly from well-established historians and experts on OB mathematics and tablets. 121.45.89.81 (talk) 05:42, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Just doing a quick Google search for "cadastral tablets ancient babylon" dating from before 2017, I find this 1996 article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3632524, whose abstract includes the sentence "Continuing the author's earlier work on the shape of fields in Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 B.C.), based on cadastral documents from Lagash province in lower Mesopotamia". Ur III is the period immediately previous to OB. At best, the sentence about cadastral OB texts and Si.427 being "among the oldest known mathematical artifacts" is misleading due to the conjunction of the claimed uniqueness and "oldest". It is certainly not the oldest cadastral tablet, from that 1996 article's abstract. Further this thesis: TERRESTRIAL CARTOGRAPHY IN ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA (https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/4350/1/Wheat13PhD.pdf) tells me that "Over one hundred and seventy maps and plans are preserved from the ancient Near East, drawn on clay tablets or inscribed in stone," and lists ten tablets from the OB period dealing with building and house plans. So perhaps these are not "cadastral", but are at the very least closely related. 121.45.89.81 (talk) 05:42, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And, lo and behold, the article "Reconstructing the Rural Landscape of the Ancient Near East" from 1996 in my previous comment supplies the quote in section 5, The Old Babylonian Period: "we can use a group of eleven cadastral documents recording properties in the Larsa kingdom...after its conquest by Hammurabi of Babylon". This puts the dating square around the time of Si.427 Further, Figure 12 of that article is titled "Reconstruction of fields from Old Babylonian cadastral texts from Larsa", citing Birot, 1969. Figure 14 gives partitions of family properties, citing Charpan, 1980. So I would strongly support removing the strong claim, based on my half an hour of literature searching that brings up contemporary and older examples 121.45.89.81 (talk) 05:55, 2 September 2021 (UTC).[reply]

There are may examples of field plans from the Ur III period, but there are no published field plans from the OB period. The figure you reference is a "reconstruction" based on a list of fields (see https://cdli.ucla.edu/search/archival_view.php?ObjectID=P423884). This is not the same thing as a field plan. Perhaps the term the term "cadastral field plan" should be used to avoid confusion. Daniel.mansfield (talk) 08:32, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Here I quote from an article published in 2020 in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies: "Very few field plans date from Old Babylonian (OB) times. This article analyses one such text, Si. 427 from Sippar...", written by ... Daniel Mansfield. Why the change in tone? Why is this tablet now unique? Personally I would trust the paper refereed by someone chosen by a JCS editor rather than someone chosen by an editor from Foundations of Science, in light of having a look at the contents of the latter journal. 110.142.52.31 (talk) 04:35, 5 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I managed to track down about ten field plans from the OB period, but only Si.427 has been published. Daniel.mansfield (talk) 23:39, 5 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Huh. So these other field plans aren't "cadastral", according to your definition? I'm only asking now out of curiosity, though the relative paucity of field plans from the OB period (compared to Ur III) might be worth mentioning in the page, citing the 2020 paper. 121.45.89.81 (talk) 00:33, 7 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I would definitely call them cadastral field plans. What I said was that none of them have been published. In other words, Si.427 is the only published cadastral field plan from the OB period. Daniel.mansfield (talk) 01:46, 7 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]