  Late-Babylonian mathematics (450-100 BC), represented by some 60 cuneiform
tablets from Babylon and Uruk, is incompletely known compared to its abundantly
preserved, well-studied Old-Babylonian predecessor (1800-1600 BC). With the
present paper, 16 fragments from Babylon, probably belonging to 13 different
tablets, are added to this corpus. Two remarkable tablets represent a hitherto
unknown class of very large factorization tables that can be adequately
described as Babylonian examples of number crunching (Section I). In these
tables a very large sexagesimal number representing a small factor (9 or 12)
raised to a high power, or a product of such numbers, is repeatedly divided by
its constituent factors (9 or 12), very likely until 1 is reached. In Text A
the initial number is a 25-digit number equivalent to 9 to the power 46; in
Text B it is a 30-digit number equivalent to 9 to the power 11 times 12 to the
power 39 - the longest number attested in ancient Mesopotamia and, probably, in
all antiquity. Most other fragments belong to tables with reciprocals (Section
II) and squares (Section III). Finally, two fragments contain multiplications
of one kind or another (Section IV).
