Cuneiform as a robust writing tradition endured 3,000 years. Different combinations of these marks represented syllables, which could in turn be put together to form words. Later scribes would chisel cuneiform into a variety of stone objects as well. by Sumerian scribes in the ancient city-state of Uruk, in present-day Iraq, as a means of recording transactions, cuneiform writing was created by using a reed stylus to make wedge-shaped indentations in clay tablets. While most tablets were, in fact, used for mundane bookkeeping or scribal exercises, some of them bear inscriptions that offer unexpected insights into the minute details of and momentous events in the lives of ancient Mesopotamians.įirst developed around 3200 B.C. It implicitly challenged the perception that cuneiform tablets were used merely for basic accounting, such as tallying grain, rather than for complex astronomical calculations. Judging by the story’s enthusiastic reception on social media, this discovery captured the public imagination. But here was proof that nearly 2,000 years earlier, ancient people were every bit as advanced as Renaissance-era scholars. 1400 that these techniques were first employed-by English and French mathematicians. Scholars had assumed it wasn’t until almost A.D. The wedge-shaped writing on the tablets, known as cuneiform, demonstrated that these ancient stargazers used geometric calculations to predict the motion of Jupiter. In early 2016, hundreds of media outlets around the world reported that a set of recently deciphered ancient clay tablets revealed that Babylonian astronomers were more sophisticated than previously believed.
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