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The 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Tablet Uses The Pythagorean Relation A Thousand Years Before Him

A Clay Tablet From The Babylonian Period Has Recently Been Discovered, Showing That Babylonian Mathematicians Were Able To Use Applied Geometry 3,700 Years Ago. 

This tablet may be the oldest example of applied geometry discovered.

Si.427 appears to have attempted to measure the terrestrial environment. The tablet dated back to the Babylonian period between 1900 and 1600 BC and was discovered in present-day Iraq in the late 19th century.

Previously housed, The tablet was in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum until it was recently translated by Dr. Daniel Menzfield of New South Wales.

In collaboration with another university professor, Mansfield had previously identified a Babylonian tablet with the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table engraved on it. At the time, they speculated that the table might use in surveying and construction.

Plimpton 322 defines right-angled triangles with the relation of Pythagoras.

According to the Pythagorean relation in a right-angled triangle, the sum of the squares of the two sides is always equal to the square of the chord. It should note that usually, no one uses trigonometric relations unless they do practical work. So Mansfield decided to look for other Babylonian tablets that used trigonometric relations.

Meanwhile, he came across the Si.427 tablet, which used geometry to calculate the terrestrial environment for sale. The tablet depicts a swamp with the cuneiform ground near the tower.

The rectangle that shows the map of this earth has equal lengths, and this shows that the surveyors of that time had invented a method to draw more parallel lines than before. This method was nothing but the Pythagorean relation.

Although these Babylonian tablets used the Pythagorean relation, Pythagoras lived more than a thousand years after this period. Mansfield argues that when a society achieves the Pythagorean triplets, that society achieves the complexity of mathematics.

The Si.427 tablet uses three sets of Pythagorean primes:

(3, 4, 5); (8, 15, 17), and (5, 12, 13). The Babylonians used the sixty systems for calculations. This system is like today’s time calculation system. However, working with prime numbers greater than 5 in this system is a complex task.

The Si.427 tablet was written at a time when personal property ownership was on the rise. Now that we know this, we can say that the meaning of all the mathematical tablets of this period has been obscured. Mathematics moved in the direction of being able to solve the problems of its time.

The only puzzle left of this tablet is the sixty number “25:29”, which is written in large letters on the tablet’s back. This number may be part of the calculations or the size of something else.

The meaning of this number is not yet clear. However, researchers have given up on solving this puzzle and are disappointed.