Archaeological find confirms that Babylonians were the first to apply geometry

The ancient Mesopotamian history of the Syriacs is considered to be among the first civilizations. The ancient Syriac ancestors, including Assyrians, Babylonians, and Arameans, gave the world tools, techniques, and methods to which modern science owes much.

A latest finding by Australian Dr Daniel Mansfield of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at UNSW in Sydney sheds new light on the history of mathematics as it reveals that an ancient Babylon clay tablet could be the oldest known example of applied geometry. The 3700-year-old Old Babylonian clay tablet was discovered by the American archaeologist Edgar Pence in the Iraqi part of Beth Nahrin (Mesopotamia), which after a great wandering, ended up in a museum in Istanbul. Dr Daniel Mansfield has studied the tablet since and found it exhibits a cadastral document with a land surveyor’s field plan revealing “that mathematics during this era was more sophisticated than previously assumed,” Mansfield says on his university’s website.

After conducting research on the tablet and its drawings, the scientist revealed that these drawings were an account of lands, and the Australian scientist concluded that the Syriacs’ ancient ancestors understood and applied mathematics a thousand years before the Greek scientist Pythagoras.

Four years ago, Dr. Mansfield and Professor Norman Wildberger of Canada attracted considerable media attention after their claim that the finding was probably the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table that could have been used by ancient mathematicians to build palaces and temples, construct canals or inspect land.

“Daniel Mansfield’s new interpretation of the remarkable Old Babylonian field plan shows clearly that Pythagorean triples like (5,12,13) and (8,15,17) were used by Old Babylon surveyors to establish perpendicular lines in their surveys around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers almost 4000 years ago.” And; “This convincingly demonstrates the application of geometry to important practical problems, long before the Greeks, and going quite a bit beyond the traditional (3,4,5) right triangle which has been found in the ruins and artifacts of many ancient civilizations.”, says Prof Norman Wildberger to UNSW.

More and more, the world is witnessing the rich civilization created by the Mesopotamian ancestors of the Syriac people.