[tshadley]

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Bakhshali_m... has some examples.

|One person possesses seven asava horses, another nine haya horses, and another ten camels. Each gives two animals, one to each of the others. They are then equally well off. Find the price of each animal and the total value of the animals possesses by each person.

| Two page-boys are attendants of a king. For their services one gets 13/6 dinaras a day and the other 3/2 . The first owes the second 10 dinaras. calculate and tell me when they have equal amounts.

[bee_rider]

Just for completeness, I noted in the description provided on that site:

> The Bakhshali manuscript is a handbook of rules and illustrative examples together with their solutions.

So, I guess these read like textbook examples because they basically are.

[amriksohata]

Wow, maybe a more obscure question, what drives this problem solving at that day and age?

[kdamica]

Not sure about this particular text, but much of the earliest writing we have is record-keeping for taxes. You could definitely imagine this kind of math being important for tax collectors to learn, since they would typically travel around to collect taxes at some interval, and would have to calculate the amounts on the fly.

[burkaman]

Yeah these could be very literal problems. The first seems useful for assessing the value of a taxable asset, and the second for paying back a loan or a penalty over time.

[carapace]

Math.

(As in, math is it's own motivation to some minds.)

These read to me like very abstract problems cast into everyday (for that time) language to make the concepts more approachable. Like "word problems" today the situations described would be apocryphal.

[jareklupinski]

if I was a palace vizier, it might be helpful to know when people serving a king have imbalances / debts that can be exploited by others