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scribes. Writing and calculating were their primary activities. Some were part of governmental and temple communities, some worked for the military, others served private citizens or taught. Many freelanced, offering their services in the marketplace for people needing letters written, legal documents drawn up, calculations made. Besides the scribes, only the rare Babylonian could read, write, or calculate. At the top of the profession were the highest-ranking priests at the temple of Marduk, who had to be able to read the texts for the rituals they used. These texts were often written in ideograms, making them inaccessible to those not trained in this particular type of text, and they often included a warning that only the initiated should even see them. Such secretiveness might have seemed prudent to Pythagoras, who instituted it later in Croton.
    Much of the information that modern scholars have about knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia comes not from this neo-Babylonian period but from the first great era of Babylon a millennium earlier (1894–1595 B.C.). Tablets that were school texts then show that teachers and scholars knew the value of pi, could calculate square and cube roots, and understood what is now known as the ‘Pythagorean’ theorem. The system of mathematics they used was already fully developed and being taught routinely to scribal students. But was the ‘Pythagorean theorem’, which had made it into the textbooks in the second millennium B.C., still known in Babylon at the time of Pythagoras? Experts on ancient Mesopotamia think not; but, if it was, Pythagoras of course might have learned it from the scribes. If he carried away with him knowledge of their sexagesimal number system – based on sixes rather than on tens – nothing of that showed up in later stories about him or his followers.
    Pythagoras would have encountered a sophisticated astronomy if he sought out Babylonians who studied the stars. ‘Early Greek science and natural philosophy’ may have begun with Thales’ observation of the eclipse on 28 May 585 B.C. but Mesopotamian scholars had long known how to predict eclipses. Again, evidence is lacking whether the learning that had been so impressive, and that is so well documented on tablets originating a thousand years earlier, was still in the grasp of Mesopotamian scribes and astronomers at the time of Nebuchadnezzar. The fact that Babylonians set up a sacred kettledrum during an eclipse and beat on it to drive off the demons that were obscuring the moon is no indication that the earlier sophistication had been lost. It is difficult to imagine even a modern society giving up such spectacle and fun just because of a scientific explanation! Later, in the Persian and Hellenistic eras, a highly mathematical Mesopotamian astronomy used observational data that had been collected for centuries in the temples.
    Pythagoras did not learn the doctrine of reincarnation in Babylon. A Babylonian – barring unusual circumstances that left him flitting around as a baleful ghost – died, went to a dismal netherworld, and stayed there.
    Though Iamblichus cannot have been correct that Pythagoras spent about thirty-four years in Egypt and Babylon (no acceptable chronology allows that much time), he was probably right that when Pythagoras returned to Samos only a few inhabitants of his home island remembered him. Nevertheless, wrote Iamblichus, he made an excellent impression with the learning he had accumulated and the tales he could tell, and was publicly requested to share this knowledge with his countrymen. That seemed an excellent idea to many Samians, until they realised what mental effort it required. Pythagoras’ audiences dwindled, those who stayed were lazy, and soon no one was listening to him. Iamblichus believed that he did not take umbrage. He was still determined to give his fellow citizens a ‘taste of the sweetness of the mathematical