Babylonian mathematics find
A cuneiform tablet, thought to be around 3,700 years old, and designated Si.427 is now said to be the oldest example of applied Pythagorean geometry. The clay tablet from Babylonia was unearthed in central Iraq in the late 1800s, and displayed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, Turkey, for more than a century.
Daniel Mansfield, a mathematician from Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW), gained access to the tablet, and recognized its significance. Mansfield had published about a similar tablet, Plimpton 322, which he determined was the oldest known trigonometric table. It shows that “the Babylonians had an advanced knowledge of mathematics and [that] Pythagoras’ theorem was known a thousand years before Pythagoras.”
The tablet is now thought to be a surveyor’s plan of a field which uses trigonometry to work out the lengths and areas of the land. It may have been used in legal disputes, or to calculate the land’s crop yield. The UNSW report says that Si.427 “reveals that mathematics during this era was more sophisticated than previously assumed.”
These findings are consistent with the history in Genesis—humans were created intelligent from the beginning—rather than evolutionary ideas of human progress from primitive ancestors. Since Babylon was in the region civilization recommenced after Noah’s Flood, we would expect to see sophistication here from the very earliest times. (For more, see creation.com/oldest-geometry.)
- Daniel Mansfield uncovers world’s oldest known example of applied geometry; maths.unsw.edu.au, 5 Aug 2021.
- Malcolm, D., Plimpton 322: A sample of ancient mathematics, J. Creation 7(2):151–154, 1993; creation.com/plimpton322.
Readers’ comments
Comments are automatically closed 14 days after publication.