Babylon was the capital of several of the most powerful empires in ancient history.

It was the capital of the Babylonian Empire for a long time, and was regarded as the global center of commerce, art, and education. It is even said to have been the world’s largest early metropolis – maybe the first to reach a population of more than 200,000 people.

It now resembles an archaeological dig site in progress, with only a few thousand residents and a few communities within its bounds.

It conceals some of the ancient world’s greatest secrets, including the Tower of Babel, which is first described in Genesis.

An American archaeologist named Edgar Banks unearthed a stone device in 1894 and sold it to antique collector George Plimpton.

In the 1930s, he donated it to Columbia University, and the tablet is now known as Plimpton 322.

The significance of the tablet was not realized at the time, and it was not until 1945 that scholars realized it contained Pythagorean triples.

The tablet was subsequently forgotten, and it wasn’t until this year that it was presented to Dr. Daniel Mansfield of the University of New South Wales in Australia, who revealed the exact value of the device’s wonder.

He described the tablet as the “most interesting, most sophisticated mathematical document from the ancient world” to the BBC’s reel exploring the tablet.

It shows that civilizations knew a lot more about mathematics than we imagined.

According to Dr. Mansfield, it demonstrates how the Mesopotamians knew Pythagorean triples at a level of sophistication “that we never expected”.

Geometry has a long history, dating back to Ancient Greece, when astronomers utilized it to decipher the movement of celestial bodies through the night sky.

The relationship between the sides and hypotenuse of a right triangle, known as Pythagoras’ Theorem in modern times, is the most famous relation in geometry.

“In reality, as Dr. Mansfield pointed out, “elements of this understanding are apparent throughout history.”

The tablet demonstrates that Babylonian surveyors had their own unique understanding of right triangles and rectangles roughly a thousand years before Greek astronomers were looking at the night sky.

But, they didn’t use the technique to look up at the night sky. Instead, they used it in their daily lives.

They didn’t have what we now refer to as a theorem.

Instead, they understood all of the specific circumstances in which the theory was true, including a plethora of examples of rectangles with pleasant, easy-to-manage dimensions.

Dr. Mansfield and his team’s new research has recently thrown light on a long-standing mystery: how the ancient Babylonians would have exploited these tablets.

He said: “This tablet shows us that the application is actually surveying, these people are making boundaries and making really accurate boundaries using their understanding of geometry.

“Pure mathematics is the study of mathematics for its own sake.

“But it’s often motivated by the problems of the day.

“Plimpton 322 arguably fits into this category because we see a mathematician generating all these rectangles and then analysing them to see which ones have regular sides, which is a relevant problem in contemporary surveying.”

The tablet reveals that Babylonian surveying improved dramatically during this period.

This is understandable given that the time period in issue coincided with the emergence of individual land ownership in Babylon.

Private land ownership can lead to a host of problems, such as disagreements about who owns which section of the land, its boundaries, or whose date palm.

There have been tens of thousands of clay tablets unearthed in the sands of modern-day Iraq at the ancient Babylonian site.

Dr. Mansfield believes that there are “many tablets out there waiting” for someone to interpret them and learn more about the old world’s workings.

Image Credit: BBC

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