The nature of land ownership changed during the Old Babylonian period, between 19 BCE. It seems those powerful institutions did not need a surveyor, or anyone else, to tell them what they owned. But they did not establish field boundaries. Professional surveyors would measure these fields to estimate the size of the harvest. Early on, large swathes of agricultural land were owned by institutions such as temples or palaces. The ancient Babylonians valued land, much as we do today. It turns out that Si.427 - which has been in Turkey’s İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzeleri (Istanbul Archaeological Museums) for several decades and is currently on display - is in fact one of the oldest examples of applied geometry from the ancient world. Si.427 shows a surveyor’s plan of a field. But its significance was not understood at the time. It was excavated by Father Jean-Vincent Scheil during an 1894 French archaeological expedition at Sippar, southwest of Baghdad. One example is the approximately 3,700-year-old cadastral survey Si.427, which depicts a surveyor’s plan of a field. Once uncovered they found their way into museums, libraries and private collections. These documents were preserved beneath the desert through millennia. Many thousands of clay tablets have been retrieved from the lost cities of ancient Babylon, in present-day Iraq. Written in stone: the world's first trigonometry revealed in an ancient Babylonian tablet My research, published today in Foundations of Science, shows the answer was hiding in plain sight. I have spent the past few years trying to find out. So why were the Babylonians interested in right-angled triangles? What did they use them for? Our modern understanding of trigonometry harks back to ancient Greek astronomers studying the movement of celestial bodies through the night sky.īut in 2017, I showed the ancient Babylonians likely developed their own kind of “proto-trigonometry” more than 1,000 years before the Greeks.
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