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.