According to Ossendrijver, one of the tablets was just two inches across and two inches high.
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Historian Alexander Jones of New York University told ScienceMag that compared with the complex geometry embraced by the ancient Greeks a few centuries later, the Babylonian inscriptions reflect “a more abstract and profound conception of a geometrical object in which one dimension represents time”. It’s a technique that historians previously thought no one came up with until medieval Europe, and it’s a staple of modern astronomy, physics and math.
“It sounds minute for a layperson, but this geometry is of a very special kind that is not found anywhere else, for instance, in ancient Greek astronomy”, Ossendrijver said. This is totally new. The red line divides the first shape into two equal areas.
“None of the tablets contains drawings but the texts describe the figure of which the area is computed as a trapezoid”. Ossendrijver has based the findings on his assessment of five tablets. The Babylonians here are working in an abstracted time-velocity space. “It’s a highly abstract application”. That time, simple arithmetic was a way to track motion of a planet across the night sky.
The connections between speed, position and time are known to most modern travelers – people easily understand speed as a measure of miles or kilometers per hour.
The tablets redefine history books, revealing that European scholars in Oxford and Paris in the 14th century, who were previously credited with developing such calculations, were in fact centuries behind their ancient Babylonian counterparts. The Babylonians used a more straightforward approach when dealing with spatial relationships between the Earth and the planets, which is different than the traditional approach of time and velocity. According to a report from the Washington Post, researchers from Humboldt University in Germany have proved that Babylonian astronomers cracked some of the biggest mysteries in space 1,400 years before the Europeans.
The text belongs to a collection of thousands of clay tablets, inscribed with cuneiform and excavated in Iraq during the 19th century.
Ossendrijver knew that four of the tablets described such calculations, and probably had to do with astronomy. Babylonian methods of astronomy became the blueprints for other astronomers to follow.
The geometric calculations technique that tracked the distance a body has traveled from a graph of its velocity against time was earlier considered to be developed around 1350 in England. With this new insight the other, thus far incomprehensible tablets could also be deciphered. Last year, a colleague handed Ossendrijver a stack of photographs, including an image of a tablet he had never seen before in the British Museum. It took a fifth tablet, which Ossendrijver calls “tablet A”, to solve the mystery. “It’s slanted. It’s like cursive if it were written very rapidly”.
The objective of four ancient Babylonian tablets at the British Museum has always been a historical mystery, but now it turns out that they describe a method that uses figures on a graph to calculate the motion of Jupiter.
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Furthermore, it was hitherto assumed that the astronomers in Babylon used arithmetical methods but no geometrical ones, even though they were common in Babylonian mathematics since 1800 BCE.
