Trigonometry in Babylonia

Did you ever think that life was much simpler centuries ago. That the studies were easy and life was rocking? It would interest the more serious students among you to know that you are not the first lot of students in human civilization struggling with mathematical concepts such as those inherent in trigonometry.

An ancient clay tablet which was discovered in the early 1900s in the area which is currently known as southern Iraq, proved to American archaeologist Edgar Banks that the ancient Babylonian civilization was fairly well educated. The tablet which is called Plimpton 322 is said to have been inscribed in the ancient Sumerian city of Larsa around 1800 BC.

It has 15 rows of inscription which detail the relationship between the three sides of a right angled triangle. The trigonometric table is a treasure trove for researchers as it proved that fairly complicated mathematics was studied and used by this ancient civilization that predates even the Greeks by nearly a 1000 years.

That ensures that the kids of this civilization also were made to study the Pythagoras theorem,  ironically about a thousand years before the Greek mathematician was born. Let’s get back to the hypotenuse and it’s opposite sides in the diagram in our book, now shall we?