The Islamic heritage in mathematics incorporated a vast body of learning from earlier civilisations, but it is almost impossible to unravel the various strands that were eventually to be woven into the complex tapestry of Islamic mathematics. Only one of these strands, that provided by the Hellenistic world, can be identified with any confidence. The Hellenistic sources, which were rendered into Arabic in the ninth and tenth centuries, either directly from the Greek or through the medium of Syriac, included most of the major works of Greek mathematics. Thus we have translations of the Elements and Data of Euclid; the Conics, The Section of a Ratio and the Determinate Solution of Apollonius of Perga; the Spherics of Theodosius of Tripoli; the Introduction to Arithmetic of Nicomachus of Gerasa; and the Spherics of Menelaus, together with the works of Hero, Theon and other important Alexandrian mathematicians and commentators. Of particular importance for Islamic mathematics (and mechanics) is Archimedes, almost all of whose writings, such as The Sphere and the Cylinder, The Measurement of the Circle, The Equilibrium of Planes and Floating Bodies were translated into Arabic. There are also a number of works in Arabic, either by Archimedes or attributed to him, for which there is no original Greek. Some of the works were translated more than once and the more influential of them, such as the Elements of Euclid and the Conics of Apollonius, had a number of commentaries written about them over the centuries. The Greek tradition, both written and oral, embodied Babylonian practices, reflecting the highly developed mathematics and astronomy of Babylon. One of the most important mathematical legacies of Babylon to the Greeks and later to the Muslims, was the sexagesimal system.