page_title: Tsinghua Bamboo Slips
section_title: Decimal multiplication table
hierarchical_section_title: Tsinghua Bamboo Slips / Decimal multiplication table
caption_attribution_description: English: Bamboo slips housed in Tsinghua University. This set of slips was a chart for calculation. 中文: 清华简之“算表”，战国时代的乘法计算工具
context_page_description: The Tsinghua Bamboo Slips are a collection of Chinese texts dating to the Warring States period and written in ink on strips of bamboo, that were acquired in 2008 by Tsinghua University, China. The texts were obtained by illegal excavation, probably of a tomb in the area of Hubei or Hunan province, and were then acquired and donated to the university by an alumnus. The very large size of the collection and the significance of the texts for scholarship make it one of the most important discoveries of early Chinese texts to date.
  On 7 January 2014 the journal Nature announced that a portion of the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips represent "the world's oldest example" of a decimal multiplication table.
context_section_description: Twenty-one bamboo slips of the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips, when assembled in the correct order, represent a decimal multiplication table that can be used to multiply numbers (any whole or half integer) up to 99.5. Joseph Dauben from the City University of New York called it "the earliest artefact of a decimal multiplication table in the world". According to Guo Shuchun, director of the Chinese Society of the History of Mathematics, those slips filled a historical gap for mathematical documents prior to the Qin Dynasty. It is presumed that officials used the multiplication table to calculate land surface area, yields of crops and the amounts of taxes owed.
caption: The world's earliest artifacts of decimal multiplication table
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