History is an evolving subject, where the latest findings or developments might just usurp the older revision, and this is apparently what happened with the latest discovery of clay tablets that pointed to how Babylonians were the ones behind the discovery of astronomical geometry – a good 1,400 years before Europeans stumbled upon it. The astronomers of Babylonia made small marks in soft clay, and relied on rather sophisticated geometry in order to figure out the orbit of Jupiter – which was known as the White Star back in the day.
These tablets can be seen to be gibberish to the untrained eye, and with thousands of such clay tablets located worldwide that remain undeciphered, it would be interesting to see what else can be dusted off and discovered – or should we say, re-discovered, if they were to go through a deciphering process.
Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin saw his findings published in the journal Science, and this is one astrophysicist who ended up as an expert in the history of ancient science. He did crack his head over the quartet of Babylonian tablets that remained in the British Museum in London, saying, “I couldn’t understand what they were about. I couldn’t understand anything about them, neither did anyone else. I could only see that they dealt with geometrical stuff.”
It was fate then in 2014 that a retired Assyriologist sent Ossendrijver several black-and-white photographs of tablets that were stored at the museum, and when he looked at it in greater detail, he noticed the tablet in the photos contained markings which functioned as some sort of of abbreviation of a longer calculation, and when comparing it to the mysterious tablets, he managed to decode the rather complex algorithms.
Filed in . Read more about Science. Source: washingtonpost