The ancient Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos argued for a heliocentric universe - one in which the Earth orbited the sun, contrary to what seems to be the case when one looks at the sky.
Mathematics progressed, as did the sharing of knowledge in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquering journeys across Asia. Early mathematics was essentially a form of counting, and the things being counted were mostly discrete objects - sheep and the like. Among them were the Babylonians who wrote in cuneiform script and, over time, adopted a sexagesimal (base 60) numbering system. The people of Mesopotamia - what is now Iraq - developed mathematics about 5,000 years ago. The tablets have been authoritatively dated to a period from 350 B.C. Most strikingly, those computations used techniques that resembled the astronomical geometry developed in the 14th century at Oxford. It’s a highly abbreviated version of a more complete computation that I already knew from five, six, seven other tablets,” he said. Text A “contains numbers and computations, additions, divisions, multiplications. The five tablets computed the predictable motion of Jupiter relative to the other planets and the distant stars. By comparing Text A to the four previously mysterious tablets, he was able to decode what was going on: This was all about Jupiter. Officially named BH40054 by the museum, and dubbed Text A by Ossendrijver, the little tablet had markings that served as a kind of abbreviation of a longer calculation that looked familiar to him. This rounded object, which he scrutinized in person in September 2015, proved to be a kind of Rosetta Stone. Ossendrijver took notice of one of them, just 2 inches across and 2 inches high. Then one day in late 2014, a retired archaeologist gave him some black-and-white photographs of tablets stored at the museum. I could only see that they dealt with geometrical stuff,” he said. I couldn’t understand anything about them, neither did anyone else. “I couldn’t understand what they were about. Ossendrijver is an astrophysicist who became an expert in the history of ancient science.įor a number of years, he has puzzled over four particular Babylonian tablets housed in the British Museum in London. Thousands of clay tablets - many unearthed in the 19th century by adventurers hoping to build museum collections in Europe, the United States and elsewhere - are undeciphered.īut they are fertile ground for Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin, whose remarkable findings were published Thursday in the journal Science. These tablets are quite incomprehensible to the untrained eye. The astronomers of Babylonia, scratching tiny marks in soft clay, used surprisingly sophisticated geometry to calculate the orbit of what they called the White Star - the planet Jupiter. But now a scholar studying ancient clay tablets suggests that the Babylonians got there first, and by at least 1,400 years. The medieval mathematicians of Oxford, toiling under torchlight in a land ravaged by plague, invented a simple form of calculus to track the motion of heavenly bodies.
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