Previously known for starting an order of astrologer-priests,
are the Ancient Babylonians are also the first ones to use sophisticated
geometry?
By: Ringo Bones
Before the recent research findings were published back in
January 29, 2016, Ancient Babylonians were more famous for establishing the
first order of astrologer-priests that would later evolve into what we know as
the science of astronomy. But that all changed when evidence were uncovered
that Ancient Babylonians were using a branch of geometry that only got
widespread use in the 14th Century. The new study is published in
the journal Science. Its author, Prof. Mathieu Ossendrijver from the Humboldt University
of Berlin, Germany said: “I wasn’t expecting this. It is completely fundamental
to physics and all branches of science use this method.” The study suggests
that sophisticated geometry – the branch of mathematics that deals with shapes –
was being used at least 1,400 years earlier than previously thought.
The possibility that Ancient Babylonians were using
geometrical calculations to track the planet Jupiter across the night sky
entered the realm of plausibility after Prof. Ossendrijver examined five
Babylonian tablets that were excavated in the 19th Century and which
are now held in the British Museum’s archives. The script reveals that the
Babylonians were using four-sided shapes, called trapezoids, to calculate when
Jupiter would appear in the night sky and also the speed and distance that it
traveled. “This figure – a rectangle with a slanted top – describes how the
velocity of a planet, which is Jupiter, changes with time,” he said. “We have a
figure where one axis, the horizontal side, represents time, and the other
axis, the vertical side, represents velocity.” “The area of the trapezoid gives
you the distance traveled by Jupiter along its orbit.” “What is so special is
that this type of graph is unknown from antiquity – so making figures of motion
in this rather abstract space of velocity against time – this is something
very, very new.” It has been previously thought that complex geometry was first
used by scholars in Oxford and Paris in Medieval times.
The Ancient Babylonians once lived in what is now Iraq and
Syria. The civilization emerged in about 1,800 BC. Clay tablets engraved in
their Cuneiform writing system have already shown these people were advanced in
astronomy. “They wrote reports about what they saw in the sky,” Prof.
Ossendrijver told the BBC World Service’s Science In Action programme. “And
they did this over a very long period of time, over centuries,” he says.
