The 3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322 at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York. An ancient Babylonian tablet whose purpose has been a longstanding mystery ...
(CNN) -- Over 1,000 years before Pythagoras was calculating the length of a hypotenuse, sophisticated scribes in Mesopotamia were working with the same theory to calculate the area of their farmland.
A 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet reveals the oldest known trigonometric table, showing ancient scribes used precise triangle ratios.