Guessing an algorithm beyond numbers displayed on a clay tablet: a sample for Old Babylonian period

International audienceIn this paper, I discussed CBS 1215, a mathematical cuneiform text which seems, at first sight, to reflect an almost entirely tacit knowledge, as it doesn’t contain a single word, but only the graphemes for 1 and 10. In the same time, as this text was first understood and interpreted by Abraham Sachs (1947), I also discussed this latter paper. I examined both the tablet CBS 1215 and Sachs’ paper in order to show:- How a lot of information may be conveyed by other means than words.- How modern interpretations of such a text may inform us more about the tacit knowledge of the modern observers than about the ancient methods