In December and January of 1983-1984, archaeologists excavating the tomb of an ancient Chinese provincial bureaucrat at a Western Han Dynasty site near Zhangjiashan, in Jiangling county, Hubei Province, discovered a number of books on bamboo strips, including inter alia works on legal statutes, military practice, and medicine. Among these was a previously unknown mathematical work on some 200 bamboo strips, the Suan shu shu, or Book of Numbers and Computations. Based upon other works found in the tomb, especially a copy of the Er nian lii ling (Laws and Decrees of the Second Year (of the reign of empress Lu, i.e. Lu Hou)), archaeologists have dated the tomb to ca. 186 BCE (Lu Hou's regency lasted from 188 to 180 BCE). The Suan shu shu, as the earliest yet discovered work devoted specifically to mathematics from ancient China, has stirred considerable interest among Chinese historians of science. The translation and commentary offered here draw extensively on the works cited in Sect. 3 below. Several appendixes devoted to specific issues related to translating the Suan shu shu, including its title and the problem of determining English equivalents for various commodities that arise in the text, may be found in Appendix II.
展开▼
机译：1983-1984年12月和1月，考古学家在湖北省江陵县张家山附近的西汉王朝遗址发掘了一个中国古代省官的墓穴，发现了许多有关竹条的书籍，其中包括有关法律的著作。法规，军事实践和医学。其中一项是以前未知的关于200条竹带的数学著作《算数书》或《数理书》。根据在墓中发现的其他作品，尤其是二年里陵（卢二世（即卢后）统治的第二年法令）的考古学家，该墓可追溯至约公元前。公元前186年（陆侯摄政时期从188年持续到180年）。算术书是最早发现的专门用于中国古代数学的著作，引起了中国科学史学家的极大兴趣。这里提供的翻译和评论广泛借鉴了Sect中引用的作品。 3以下。附录II中有几个附录，专门介绍了与Suan shu shu的翻译有关的特定问题，包括标题和确定文本中出现的各种商品的英语等效问题。
展开▼
