Post by UKarchaeology on Jan 29, 2016 18:14:00 GMT
A scholar studying ancient clay tablets suggests that the Babylonians got there first, and by at least 1,400 years. He knew they involved geometrical computations, and thought they may involve Jupiter, but did not have enough information to go on to make any solid claims. Calculating the area under a curve to determine a numerical value is a basic operation, known as the integral between two points, in calculus.
The breakthrough came in 2015, when a colleague visiting from Vienna in Austria handed a stack of mid-20th-century photographs to Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin.
Four of the tablets have been known since their discovery in Babylon, near the temple Esagila, in the 19th century. The giant planet was a favorite among the Babylonians, who equated the orb with their main god, Marduk, patron deity of the city of Babylon. They believed that the planet’s position in the sky could predict a plentiful grain crop, or the level of the river Euphrates, for example.
Such a find also speaks to the human spirit of discovery-both of the ancient astronomers who gazed at the heavens, and the modern researchers who seek to reconstruct their understanding of the cosmos. And “a lot of their astronomy was done for astrology”.
Jupiter was particularly important to the Babylonians.
From the perspective of someone standing on Earth, Jupiter doesn’t travel across the sky at a uniform speed. So it would have been hard for priests to predict its position in the sky without advanced mathematical algorithms.
Full story: www.weupit.com/babylonians-used-geometry-to-track-jupiter-1400-years-before-europeans/18266/