Emrullah Yiğit 

Mehmet Efe Zengin

 

 

An engraved Babylonian earth tablet dating back nearly 3,700 years confirms that applied geometry was known in the Middle East more than 1,000 years before the famous Greek rationalist and mathematician Pythagoras's birth, according to a new study led by scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.

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Tablet clay Si.427 with texts on the back of the tablet in cuneiform, one of the earliest systems of writing

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"It's the only known example of a cadastral document from the OB period, which is a blueprint used by surveyors to determine land boundaries,” stated lead author Dr. Daniel Mansfield from UNSW Science's School of Mathematics and Statistics. "It offers us legal and geometric facts about a field that's split after some of it was sold off," he continued. The object is crucial partly because whoever engraved it used what became known as "Pythagorean triples," or any three positive numbers that meet the formula                            and aid in precise land surveying.

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Dr. Daniel Mansfield studying tablet clay Si.427.

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"The discovery and analysis of the tablet have important implications for the history of mathematics," Mansfield said, adding that these concepts were known much earlier than previously thought. "It is widely accepted that trigonometry – the branch of mathematics concerned with the study of triangles – was developed by the ancient Greeks studying the night sky in the second century BCE," he articulated. "However, the Babylonians developed their own 'proto-geometry' to deal with problems involving the ground rather than the sky."

 

"With this new tablet, we can truly see interestingly why they were intent on calculation: to write down accurate land borders," Mansfield remarked after the discovery of the Babylonian earth tablets with numerical articulations and indications. Despite the fact that the texts on the tablets are incomprehensible, Mansfield plans to enlist the assistance of students of history or mathematics who may suspect what the numbers such as 25 and 29 on the tablet are seeking to tell us!
 

References: 

University of New South Wales. https://www.jpost.com/archaeology/babylonians-used-applied-geometry-centuries-before-greeks-676256