Evidence ancient Babylonians were far more advanced than we thought - BBC REEL

Plimpton 322 is the name given to a 3,800-year-old clay tablet discovered in Iraq in the early 20th Century by archeologist Edgar J Banks, the man believed to have inspired Indiana Jones. Over time this tablet has become one of the most significant and most studied objects of the ancient world.

Dr Daniel Mansfield, of the University of New South Wales, who has studied Plimpton 322 along with other similar tablets, argues that these are evidence that the Babylonians were solving real-world problems, such as surveying, using the basics of Pythagoras' theorem 1,000 years before the ancient Greeks.

Produced by Lucas Mullikin

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[priceringo]

I would have appreciated more discussion about WHAT was actually discovered on the tablet and how it was relevant to land surveying.

[JosueCorella]

They were definitely smarter than people who spend all day on social media

[artistjoh]

There is mathematician’s geometry, but there is also on-the-ground geometry. I learned this on the farm growing up. My father never went to high school, yet he used geometry constantly and had a practical understanding of it. For example, he had never heard of Pythagoras but he knew that if he wanted to make a right angle when building a new shed, he just needed to have three ropes each paced out and marked at 5, 4, and 3 paces, 3 people hold the corners and it will create a 90 degree angle for getting the building square. He could trace accurate arcs by hammering a peg in the ground and them tying a rope to it them marking out the arc with pegs any size up to the length of the rope. When calculating how many posts to cut and how much wire to buy for a new fence, he painted a white mark on the tractor rear wheel then drive the route of the fence and count the revolutions of the wheel. since he could measure the circumference of the wheel it was then just a matter of multiplying that length by the number of revolutions and he had an accurate measure across hundreds of yards. This kind of practical geometry requires no sophisticated knowledge of math, and I would suggest was very similar to practical knowledge of farmers and builders of poor people’s buildings in ancient Mesopotamia and even earlier.

I expect that Stonehenge, as an example can easily be made a circle by primitive peoples just with a peg in the center, and a rop[e to mark the circle. Easy. Finding levels for say, building the pyramids, can be done by using clay to make a trough say 3 metres long, doesn’t have to be wide, filling it with water, then marking the wet clay side. To mark a level across a long distance it is possible to just look along the line made in the clay and then pulling down the trough except to the side with the line in it. Then get someone to walk the required distance, hammer a peg in the ground, then “sight” along the line in the clay and get the person at the peg to move a stick up and down the peg until it matches the sight mark. greater accuracy can be obtained by making the clay trough longer and for a narrow trough it is relatively easy to make it as long as the base of any of the pyramids but the shorter trough and then sighting is surprisingly accurate.

I would thus suggest that the practical usage of geometry came probably thousands of years before Mesopotamian scribes and Greek scientists formalised it into written rules. Rope and pegs in the ground was technology well within the scope of humans tens of thousands of years ago. And it wouldn’t take long after the invention of the wheel to realize that it is a perfect device for measuring long distances, a useful skill in mesopotamia if trying to estimate the amount of time needed to dig an irrigation channel.

I would also suggest that while academics might struggle to imagine people knowing how to work with triangles before Pythagoras, I think they should appreciate the practical application of such things because of practical necessity by very unsophisticated and uneducated people working the land. There are large circles and right angles used by the builders of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey made thousands of years before the Sumerians and their writing and math. They might have been relatively unsophisticated folk, but they did have rope and the ability to drive a peg in the ground…

[ibeetellingya]

Babylonians used a base-60 numerical system, which is still used today in the measurement of time (60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour) and angles (360 degrees in a circle).

[LukeVilent]

My wife is a student - she is actually paid for doing transcriptions of Babylonian tablets as of right now - and so I've got some scent of how the ancient world looked like. She taught me a bit of Akkadian - the language of Old Babylonians = too. When you read the documents, they sound extremely modern. In private letters, people write of everyday problems: here the son laments, that the mom writes to him too seldom, and asks for oil as a medicine; there a mom and a wife accuse the man of forgetting the gods and urging to bring a sacrifice - sounds just like "light a candle for Holy Mary". Letters of kings to officials look like a correspondence between a CEO and his employees. Official documents, like credits, wills and bills, are written by a scheme, created in several copies, witnessed, and so on and so forth.

If there is a window into the "so much different" past, we can see that, even if the times were alien, people and the way they address their everyday problems, was pretty much the same.

[Thedarkknight]

It’s crazy how some concepts are so useful, they can be forgotten and rediscovered throughout history

[gandolph]

I did informal study for several years and discovered among other things that the ancient Egyptians used number place value notation (which people think they did not have]) and had command of Pythagoraen triplets long before Pythagoras. So, other ancient civilizations are not really a surprise. The ancient world was different than what has mostly been believed.

[ross-smithfamily]

The Plimpton 322 clay tablet was essentially an ancient Babylonian "cheat sheet" for surveyors. That is beyond cool!!

[JonnoPlays]

Can we really call them Pythagorean triangles if we now know he didn't invent them? 🤔 Lots of history needs a second look it seems... Check out all the geometry inside the King's Chamber in the great pyramid. Mathematics is older than we knew.

[sherylcrowe]

Reorganizing the world's archives aka: museums primarily into some sort of a cohesive catalog similar to how libraries are organized is absolutely critical in order to help current researchers use their collections to their potential!!

[idraote]

As far as I am concerned, I'm certainly not underestimating any of those ancient peoples: their view of the existing universe was so complex and multifaceted that it could only come from extremely sophisticated minds. They created towns, they built buildings that would be a challenge even today, they had a rich literature, they studied the sky...

[marcusward]

Why is it so hard to believe there were always smart people

[cmedeir]

Yes, The Ancients were *not* stupid like everyone seems to think ("only aliens could have built the pyramids"). They obviously had a much better understanding of their world. Just because they understood it 'differently' doesn't mean it was wrong or less than ours.

[nunyabiznes]

Basically everyone in the past is far more advanced than we give them credit for. Which is why I get pissed off we people just go "Aliens!" when they see some impressive structure or artifact.

[ДаниилФролов-мл]

I love how small things may contain big. Here - a tablet more than twice lesser than a hand, and gives a perspective on ancient's maths and how they used it in land-owning problems. (That's also one of many reasons I love archeology.)

[PkDndMcG]

Many scholars have said that the Egyptian Pyramids couldn't have been constructed without knowledge of calculus. Idk why any of this is a shock to anyone

[NLaertes]

Pythagoras: Geometry starts with me...
Babylonians: Hold my claytable...

[jpvq]

Random Babylonian: I just wanna write my thoughts

Modern Humans: This is greatest science discovery

[陈嫩草]

Never underestimate the wisdom and knowledge of our ancestors. Morden people, always be humble and grateful, please!

[dreamscape]

3:32 Seeing that ancient clay tablet above a computer keyboard is something else