Matthew Ossendriyver from the Humboldt University of Berlin came to the conclusion that the inhabitants of Babylon 1.8 thousand years earlier than the Europeans learned to determine the position of Jupiter in the sky. The historian published the research results in the journal Science.
Ossendriver came to his conclusions after deciphering the cuneiform writing on four surviving ancient Babylonian clay tablets. The samples studied were created between 350 and 50 BC and are the oldest known examples of the use of geometry to calculate the position of celestial bodies.
The tablets show the calculation of the position of Jupiter in the sky using a trapezoid. Previously, scientists believed that Babylonian astronomers used only arithmetic to find the position of celestial bodies. Research shows that the Babylonians were centuries ahead of the ancient Greeks in astronomy.
The first mention of Babylon dates back to the 3rd millennium BC. At the dawn of its existence, the settlement was one of the provincial Sumerian cities. At dawn, the population of the ancient metropolis reached 150 thousand people. The city fell into decay after the conquest in the 16th century BC by the Hittites and destroyed in the 1st millennium AD.