An Australian mathematician has discovered what may be the oldest known example of applied geometry, on a 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet. Known as Si.427, the tablet bears a field plan measuring the boundaries of some land, according to The Guardian.
The tablet dates from the Old Babylonian period between 1900 and 1600 BCE and was discovered in the late 19th century in what is now Iraq. It had been housed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum before Dr. Daniel Mansfield from the University of New South Wales tracked it down.
Mansfield and Norman Wildberger, an associate professor at University of New South Wales, had previously identified another Babylonian tablet as containing the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table. At the time, they speculated the tablet was likely to have had some practical use, possibly in surveying or construction.
That tablet, Plimpton 322, described right-angle triangles using Pythagorean triples: three whole numbers in which the sum of the squares of the first two equals the square of the third – for example, 32 + 42 = 52.
“You don’t just accidentally come up with trigonometry, you’re usually doing something practical,” Mansfield said. Plimpton 322 set him on a quest to find other tablets from the same period that contained Pythagorean triples, eventually leading him to Si.427.
“Si.427 is about a piece of land that’s being sold,” Mansfield said. In the cuneiform script, with its characteristic wedge-shaped indentations, the tablet describes a field containing marshy areas, as well as a threshing floor and nearby tower.
The rectangles depicting the field have opposite sides of equal length, suggesting surveyors of that time period had devised a way to create perpendicular lines more accurately than before, according to Mansfield.
“Much like we would today, you’ve got private individuals trying to figure out where their land boundaries are, and the surveyor comes out but instead of using a piece of GPS equipment, they use Pythagorean triples,” he explained.
