A scholar studying ancient clay tablets suggests that the Babylonians managed to invent a simple form of calculus used to track the motion of planets by at least 1,400 years earlier than Europeans. The astronomers of Babylonia used geometry to calculate the orbit of the planet Jupiter that they called the White Star.
Many of the ancient Babylonian clay tablets remain still undeciphered because they are quite incomprehensible to the untrained eye. Most of the tablets were discovered in the 19th century by adventurers. They are now found in museum collections in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.
Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin is an astrophysicist who is also an expert in the history of ancient science. He studied four particular Babylonian tablets found in the British Museum in London. The report of his study was published in the journal Science.
According to an interview for The Washington Post, Ossendrijver was puzzled at first and couldn't understand what the clay tablets were about. But he finally noticed that one of the Babylonian tables is a kind of Rosetta Stone.
The clay tablet was dubbed Text A by Ossendrijver. The tablet contains multiplications, divisions, additions and computations. The scientist compared Text A to the four previously mysterious tablets and was able to understand that this was all about Jupiter. All five tablets tracked the motion of Jupiter relative to distant stars and other planets.
The methodology for the computations that predict the motion of the planet Jupiter resembled the astronomical geometry developed later on in Europe, in the 14th century. The Babylonian clay tablets are dated to a period ranging between 350 B.C. and 50 B.C.
According to The Washington Post, John Steele, a professor at the Brown University, declared that this important discovery proves that the people of Mesopotamia developed a form of astronomical geometry and "demonstrates just how clever the ancient astronomers were".
