It is a well-known fact that ancient civilizations around the globe were extremely good astronomers.
Mankind has observed the stars for thousands of years, looking to the sky for answers.
Observations of the night sky were eventually documented by the ancients.
And one such observation has proven that ancient Babylonian astronomers were able to calculate the movement of Jupiter using what has been revealed as an early form of geometric calculus.
The interesting part is the Babylonian did more than 1,400 years before the technique was ‘invented’ in Europe.
This is groundbreaking for a couple of reasons.
First of all, it clearly demonstrates that ancient Mesopotamian astronomers figured out how to accurately predict the movement of the planet Jupiter more than 1,000 years before the appearance of the first telescopes.
And they did so by using mathematical equations that would later become the very foundations of modern calculus.
This shows just how highly developed this ancient culture was,” historian Matthieu Ossendrijver from Humboldt University in Germany revealed Maddie Stone at Gizmodo in a 2015 article detailing the discovery. “I don’t think anybody expected something like this would be discovered in a Babylonian text.”
To uncover the ancient Mesopotamian astronomical secrets, Ossendrijver analyzed photographs of an ancient astronomical tablet. Eventually, the scientist decoded it and uncovered the meaning of a weird trapezoid that was carved into the stone more than 2,000 years ago.
The key to understanding the astronomical secrets of the ancients was the trapezoid shape that had caused confusion among experts who could not understand by four other Babylonian tablets cite it when referring to Jupiter’s movements across the sky.
There had already been a plethora of evidence to suggest that basic forms of geometry were used by ancient Babylonian mathematicians, but until recently, we had only uncovered signs of them using arithmetic.
The question that arose was why the ancient astronomers would they making reference to geometrical calculations based upon the long and short sides of the weird trapezoid fond on the tablets.
And without the photographs of a tablet analyzed by Ossendrijver, we would probably never have understood it.
The ancient tablets, written in cuneiform, were excavated by archeologists in modern-day Iraq in the nineteenth century and were eventually brought to England to the British Museum.
And while Ossendrijver had already seen the four previous tablets, the fifth one was unknown to him.
The key was proven to hold the missing key to understanding how ancient astronomers used the trapezoid shape to predict Jupiter’s position int the sky.
This was essential in ancient Mesopotamia as it directly influenced their beliefs about weather, the price of trade goods, as well as the river levels throughout the years.
The fifth tablet has been found to accurately describe the necessary procedure for calculating the Gas Giant’s movement across the ecliptic plane, and the path that the Sun appears to trace through the stars, over the course of a year, explained Gizmodo.
