SI.427, Old Babylonian period (1900-1600 BCE)

The ancient clay tablet was discovered and cataloged along with many other tablets by the 1894 French archaeological expedition at Sippar in central Iraq.

The Babylonians used a base 60 number system – similar to how we keep time today – which made working with prime numbers larger than five difficult.

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.

That tablet 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.

A Reminder of My Best Week of Work

I let the little dogs out and heard an elk bugling in the distance.  At first I thought “This is too early.” but as the sound continued, my mind went back over 30 years, to the finest week of work I have ever enjoyed. It was in the late 80’s, and I was working for Cadastral – and the task was to relocate and mark the survey monuments on the mining claims in the ten lakes basin. It was a simple…