7 ms·

Use of geometrical methods in Babylonian mathematical astronomy (2016)

64 points by Anon84 5y ago

DecentAI 5y ago
- kardianos 5y ago
  This is a really odd (bad?) framing. I've never heard of someone who is impressed by Ancient Greek science/knowledge/ability talk down about Babylonian/Egyption. Most histories I read talk about how many of these are connected and were successive. Can you cite some "pro western supremaciests" you refer to? It honestly sounds like you are just making stuff up to try to demonize other people.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jvanderbot 5y ago
    I've heard this before. TBF, there is a lot of idealistic portrayals of Greek society and philosophers in western media, and Egypt and Persian peoples are usually the bad guys. Whether you believe that is a deep set prejudice and active discrimination campaign or a natural tendency re the history of one's continent is up to you.
    - kardianos 5y ago
      > I've heard this before. TBF, there is a lot of idealistic portrayals of Greek society and philosophers in western media, and Egypt and Persian peoples are usually the bad guys. Sometimes nations (Greek, Roman, Persian, etc...) killed and pillaged and from the perspective of someone writing what is now histories, yes, those people doing the killing would be termed "bad guys". > Whether you believe that is a deep set prejudice and active discrimination campaign or a natural tendency re the history of one's continent is up to you. You can actually measure sentiment to some degree. It sounds like you are trying to mind read. Don't do that.
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      Pre-Islamic Persia barely appears at all in Western media outside of stories about Alexander the Great, the 300 narrative, some random Biblical stuff where Cyrus the Great does a cameo, and I guess the Prince of Persia video games. The only consistent negative portrayal seems to be around the 300, which while a-historic in its telling is just kind of a lazy trope.
      - readthenotes1 5y ago
        That is a late 20th century phenomenon. If you go back into the 1800s and earlier, it was pretty common for a college kids to spend a lot of time learning to translate ancient Greek texts. 2 interesting and good reads are the cyropedia and the anabasis, both by xenophon, and neither portraying the Persians in a negative light.
      - pm90 5y ago
        > Pre-Islamic Persia barely appears at all in Western media Wait, you’re talking about Hollywood/ PostWW2 Western media, right? Because if we look back at how Western historians generally framed the events of the eighteenth century onwards, its almost always been of eastern and oriental cultures as being savages and it was the “White Mans Burden” to bring them the light of civilization.
        ch4s3 5y ago
        I was responding to a comment about Western media. Which is a 20th century affair. I also think 18th and 19th century we working from a much more limited set of historical information. Persepolis was first excavated in the 1930s. Old Persian Cuneiform wasn't fully deciphered until around 1850 and was the basis for decipherment of other languages using cuneiform. It wasn't until then tat any primary historical texts could even be studied. Whereas Greek never disappeared and ancient greek was studied from the classical era onwards. A lot of what we knew about old Persia prior to the 1850s came from people like Xenophon who had a particular ax to grind in contemporary (to him) Greece and used Cyruus and Persia as stand in for ideas he wanted to compare and contrast with Athens and Sparta.
    - jvanderbot 5y ago
      With no way to edit my comment to include the corrections below, I'll just state that my opinion has softened.
  - mtalantikite 5y ago
    It seems to be pretty rampant within alt-right corners [1]. But yes, of course they're interconnected for anyone that spends time reading and thinking about it. [1] https://www.vox.com/2019/11/6/20919221/alt-right-history-greece-rome-donna-zuckerberg https://www.vox.com/2019/11/6/20919221/alt-right-history-gre...
    - kardianos 5y ago
      Uh, this article is someone on "the left" talking about why "the right" thinks it is important to study history. In this case, cites that "the right" is concerned with how civilizations fail, such as the Roman Empire. This doesn't have anything to do with western supremacists, and it very much isn't someone on "the right" talking about themselves. I'm totally cool with reading history and trying to learn from it.
      - pm90 5y ago
        From the article: > The men who consume this stuff — and yes, it’s almost exclusively men — tend to believe two things: that ancient Greek and Roman culture are the basis of Western civilization and that these cultures are the exclusive achievements of white men. > But the idea isn’t merely to celebrate these ancient cultures. The goal is to turn a phrase like “Western civilization” into code for “white culture” and to cement a narrative about history that glorifies patriarchy and undercuts cultural progressivism. Your framing of the article is wildly incorrect. It makes it pretty clear that White Supremacists aren’t concerned about history in itself, but in a framing that glorifies white men. Presumably its analogous to how neo nazis revere Hitler and the Nazi party. The goal in each case is a yearning for “better times in the past” by emulating the past days of “glory”.
        zmgsabst 5y ago
        That’s a description given by their political rivals — and a strawman. It also doesn’t support the original claim: that people talk down about Babylon and Egypt, a claim that never appears in the article. Celebrating Greece and Rome as European achievements doesn’t denigrate people from other areas. Nor does acknowledging how their philosophy filtered into European and later American thought. The paragraph you cited sounds like a bad faith “hit piece” unrelated to the claims that are being discussed regarding Babylon and Egypt.
  - schuyler2d 5y ago
    There are so many examples it's maybe hard to know where to begin -- after all it happened for at least 1-5 centuries in modern/pre-modern history, and before then the Greeks and then the Romans, e.g. did it themselves. There are whole sub-fields of history of science about this process. Ask yourself why names like Al Kindi and Kandiaronk are unfamiliar or unlikely to be familiar to you -- or Western statecraft begins at Plato or Weber rather than its grounding in Chinese statecraft brought over mostly by Leibniz. Which Arab scientists inspired Kepler and his predecessors and why are you unlikely to have learned that history -- even though it's been known for over a century. If you're genuinely interested here are maybe some places to start: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0948GPBBH/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0948GPBBH/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... (Dawn of Everything by Graeber) https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/islamic-world https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/islamic-world https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XXY491X/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XXY491X/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... (Orientalism by Said) edit: here's a popular article detailing an example of how concerted and conscious this process is and then 'lost to history' due to the layers of our educational environment: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh...
    - pythagowannabe 5y ago
      I know invoking astrology is a good way to discredit oneself, but that particular historic perspective attributes the origin of proto-scientific knowledge to the lost races from before the last cataclysm. This is generalizing a lot on my part, but trying to reveal the identity of Hermes Trismagestis will take you on a tour of the ancient world that crosses continents in ways you would never imagine. This is all to say that the Babylonians and Egyptians were extremely revered and cited this entire time for their scientific knowledge TO THIS DAY (take a look at our nation's symbolism).
      - schuyler2d 5y ago
        How we view astrology is a good example of how our racial/ethnic imaginations and imagined 'heritage' distort the record. For people like Newton and Copernicus their obsessions with alchemy and astrology are sidelined/excused/footnotes that are charming as we offset it against their scientific contributions, while Arabic, Egyptian, Babylonian and other sources are dismissed because they "were only doing it for astrology" and couldn't have known/understood the 'real' science/scientific value of their work.
- throwingrocks 5y ago
  > not surprised > finally reveal You’re talking as if you know something others don’t?
- lalos 5y ago
  Not only this, but most of the knowledge got recovered from Arabic texts/libraries in the Iberian peninsula after they got kicked out, i.e. Betelgeuse from the constellation Orion is a misspelling/mistranslated. Also, sine and cosine have an interesting history encoded in its Latin name, feel free to research the origins of those words too.
- ordu 5y ago
  This cuneiform is from 350 to 50 BCE. 350BCE is in the lifetime of Aristotle. 50BCE is long after Archimedes was dead. So it is easily can be that Babylonians learned something from Greeks.
- Banana699 5y ago
  As an Egyptian those kinds of activist interpretation of history are just endlessly tiring and no less annoying than when/if the occasional Greek-fevered guy or gal think that Greeks invented knowledge in exactly 300 BC. and not a year before. There are many reasons not to descend into this kind of point-scoring: - Zeroth, it's super disrespectful, all of those cultures were the first breath of civilization that we know of. I'm not an emotional guy and I'm fairly pissed off at a lot of aspects of human civilizations, but even I think that the Old Ones deserve more respect than being compared to each other in a fantasy, silly competition that nobody asked for and doesn't serve anything except satisfying petty modern grievances. ("nooo, my ancients could beat up your ancients"). - First, the premise is naive and ahistoric. The modern 'west' was shaped by countless forces, Christianity, Islam's contact, Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, colonialism, etc... Exactly zero (0) of those things happened to Classical Greece, the 'west' would be as alien a civilization to them as Persians. When you start looking for other civilizations achievements to 'offset' the contribution of Greeks, you fail to notice that the Greeks aren't western in any reasonable sense of the word. You have been dragged into a game with fundamentally silly rules. Don't try to win silly games. - Second, civilizations reinvent each other's wheels all the time, there is no reason why the same environment that inspired Egyptian and Babylonian scholars didn't also inspire Greek scholars. - Third, it's exaggerated how much 'white supremacist' actually exist outside of one or more imagination. The term became meaningless. Liking your civilization more is not being supremacist, it's a natural, if misguided, instinct that is present in the vast majority of population of all cultures.
platz 5y ago
does it matter whether you have a heliocentric or a geocentric worldview when using this method?
- herodotus 5y ago
  No. Babylonian astronomers created arithmetical techniques for predicting key events of the moon and planets, such as the date that Jupiter reached a stationary point in the sky. (The stationary point is the positions where Jupiter starts its retrograde motion). They were not trying to explain the nature of the universe (cosmology). Ptolemy derived cosmological models based on geometry, but even he was interested in prediction, not explanation. In both cases, it does not matter whether the astronomer's view is helio- or geo- centric. Ptolemy used a geocentric model, but he did point out that a heliocentric version was a possible alternative. Even Copernicus was not really that concerned with cosmology: he was showing an alternative to Ptolemy based on the heliocentric view of what he thought was the universe (now known to be the solar system). In my view it was Galileo who really first proposed that these models went beyond prediction to describe the reality of the cosmos.
  - trasz 5y ago
    Do we know why they tried to predict, but not explain? Or would prediction simply be a prerequisite for explanation?
    - rosetremiere 5y ago
      I heard (iirc in the “In our time” podcast) that they associated rare/unusual cosmological events (say, a solar eclipse) with signs from the gods. Hence, to better read the signs, you want to know what's normal/predicted. Don't quote me on this, though :)
    - herodotus 5y ago
      The most likely reason was because there was an obvious correlation between astronomical events and things that happened on earth. The most obvious are seasonal weather events, which are obviously important for agriculture. Having noticed that these earthly events correlated with certain astronomical events, it was natural to extend this to predicting other events based on astronomical "omens" such as conjunctions, risings, stationary points and so on. It is likely that Babylonian rulers used astrologers when making decisions such as the best time to attack a neighbour.
gumby 5y ago
To flip this around: I have a chromatography textbook from only 20 years ago that teaches computing the area under the curve using what it called the “plate” method (i.e. draw rectangles inside the curve on the instrument’s printout and then add up their areas).
- foob 5y ago
  I had a physics professor many years back who told me about how they sometimes used to measure integrals by cutting out the areas of a plot they were interested in and weighing the resulting paper.
  - nh23423fefe 5y ago
    But negative area??? Maybe it was printed on complex paper
    - FastMonkey 5y ago
      You could cut the paper along the X axis, and subtract the area below from the area above.
ncmncm 5y ago
We like to think we know who did what in early mathematics, but we really only know about Greeks whose compatriots took the trouble to write down their names. This particular result is contemporary with some of those selfsame Greeks. There is no telling which way advancements moved. Most likely it was both ways, by then. But there had been a long tradition of traveling to Egypt to learn geometry from the masters, and also of not naming foreigners one got things from. Going on two millennia later, Francis Bacon was scrupulous about reserving credit to Al-Haytham for inventing Science as we know it today. People following Bacon were not, so much.

64 points by Anon84 5y ago

DecentAI 5y ago

kardianos 5y ago
This is a really odd (bad?) framing. I've never heard of someone who is impressed by Ancient Greek science/knowledge/ability talk down about Babylonian/Egyption. Most histories I read talk about how many of these are connected and were successive. Can you cite some "pro western supremaciests" you refer to? It honestly sounds like you are just making stuff up to try to demonize other people.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  I've heard this before. TBF, there is a lot of idealistic portrayals of Greek society and philosophers in western media, and Egypt and Persian peoples are usually the bad guys. Whether you believe that is a deep set prejudice and active discrimination campaign or a natural tendency re the history of one's continent is up to you.
  - kardianos 5y ago
    > I've heard this before. TBF, there is a lot of idealistic portrayals of Greek society and philosophers in western media, and Egypt and Persian peoples are usually the bad guys. Sometimes nations (Greek, Roman, Persian, etc...) killed and pillaged and from the perspective of someone writing what is now histories, yes, those people doing the killing would be termed "bad guys". > Whether you believe that is a deep set prejudice and active discrimination campaign or a natural tendency re the history of one's continent is up to you. You can actually measure sentiment to some degree. It sounds like you are trying to mind read. Don't do that.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    Pre-Islamic Persia barely appears at all in Western media outside of stories about Alexander the Great, the 300 narrative, some random Biblical stuff where Cyrus the Great does a cameo, and I guess the Prince of Persia video games. The only consistent negative portrayal seems to be around the 300, which while a-historic in its telling is just kind of a lazy trope.
    - readthenotes1 5y ago
      That is a late 20th century phenomenon. If you go back into the 1800s and earlier, it was pretty common for a college kids to spend a lot of time learning to translate ancient Greek texts. 2 interesting and good reads are the cyropedia and the anabasis, both by xenophon, and neither portraying the Persians in a negative light.
    - pm90 5y ago
      > Pre-Islamic Persia barely appears at all in Western media Wait, you’re talking about Hollywood/ PostWW2 Western media, right? Because if we look back at how Western historians generally framed the events of the eighteenth century onwards, its almost always been of eastern and oriental cultures as being savages and it was the “White Mans Burden” to bring them the light of civilization.
      - ch4s3 5y ago
        I was responding to a comment about Western media. Which is a 20th century affair. I also think 18th and 19th century we working from a much more limited set of historical information. Persepolis was first excavated in the 1930s. Old Persian Cuneiform wasn't fully deciphered until around 1850 and was the basis for decipherment of other languages using cuneiform. It wasn't until then tat any primary historical texts could even be studied. Whereas Greek never disappeared and ancient greek was studied from the classical era onwards. A lot of what we knew about old Persia prior to the 1850s came from people like Xenophon who had a particular ax to grind in contemporary (to him) Greece and used Cyruus and Persia as stand in for ideas he wanted to compare and contrast with Athens and Sparta.
  - jvanderbot 5y ago
    With no way to edit my comment to include the corrections below, I'll just state that my opinion has softened.
- mtalantikite 5y ago
  It seems to be pretty rampant within alt-right corners [1]. But yes, of course they're interconnected for anyone that spends time reading and thinking about it. [1] https://www.vox.com/2019/11/6/20919221/alt-right-history-greece-rome-donna-zuckerberg https://www.vox.com/2019/11/6/20919221/alt-right-history-gre...
  - kardianos 5y ago
    Uh, this article is someone on "the left" talking about why "the right" thinks it is important to study history. In this case, cites that "the right" is concerned with how civilizations fail, such as the Roman Empire. This doesn't have anything to do with western supremacists, and it very much isn't someone on "the right" talking about themselves. I'm totally cool with reading history and trying to learn from it.
    - pm90 5y ago
      From the article: > The men who consume this stuff — and yes, it’s almost exclusively men — tend to believe two things: that ancient Greek and Roman culture are the basis of Western civilization and that these cultures are the exclusive achievements of white men. > But the idea isn’t merely to celebrate these ancient cultures. The goal is to turn a phrase like “Western civilization” into code for “white culture” and to cement a narrative about history that glorifies patriarchy and undercuts cultural progressivism. Your framing of the article is wildly incorrect. It makes it pretty clear that White Supremacists aren’t concerned about history in itself, but in a framing that glorifies white men. Presumably its analogous to how neo nazis revere Hitler and the Nazi party. The goal in each case is a yearning for “better times in the past” by emulating the past days of “glory”.
      - zmgsabst 5y ago
        That’s a description given by their political rivals — and a strawman. It also doesn’t support the original claim: that people talk down about Babylon and Egypt, a claim that never appears in the article. Celebrating Greece and Rome as European achievements doesn’t denigrate people from other areas. Nor does acknowledging how their philosophy filtered into European and later American thought. The paragraph you cited sounds like a bad faith “hit piece” unrelated to the claims that are being discussed regarding Babylon and Egypt.
- schuyler2d 5y ago
  There are so many examples it's maybe hard to know where to begin -- after all it happened for at least 1-5 centuries in modern/pre-modern history, and before then the Greeks and then the Romans, e.g. did it themselves. There are whole sub-fields of history of science about this process. Ask yourself why names like Al Kindi and Kandiaronk are unfamiliar or unlikely to be familiar to you -- or Western statecraft begins at Plato or Weber rather than its grounding in Chinese statecraft brought over mostly by Leibniz. Which Arab scientists inspired Kepler and his predecessors and why are you unlikely to have learned that history -- even though it's been known for over a century. If you're genuinely interested here are maybe some places to start: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0948GPBBH/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0948GPBBH/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... (Dawn of Everything by Graeber) https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/islamic-world https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/islamic-world https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XXY491X/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XXY491X/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... (Orientalism by Said) edit: here's a popular article detailing an example of how concerted and conscious this process is and then 'lost to history' due to the layers of our educational environment: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh...
  - pythagowannabe 5y ago
    I know invoking astrology is a good way to discredit oneself, but that particular historic perspective attributes the origin of proto-scientific knowledge to the lost races from before the last cataclysm. This is generalizing a lot on my part, but trying to reveal the identity of Hermes Trismagestis will take you on a tour of the ancient world that crosses continents in ways you would never imagine. This is all to say that the Babylonians and Egyptians were extremely revered and cited this entire time for their scientific knowledge TO THIS DAY (take a look at our nation's symbolism).
    - schuyler2d 5y ago
      How we view astrology is a good example of how our racial/ethnic imaginations and imagined 'heritage' distort the record. For people like Newton and Copernicus their obsessions with alchemy and astrology are sidelined/excused/footnotes that are charming as we offset it against their scientific contributions, while Arabic, Egyptian, Babylonian and other sources are dismissed because they "were only doing it for astrology" and couldn't have known/understood the 'real' science/scientific value of their work.
throwingrocks 5y ago
> not surprised > finally reveal You’re talking as if you know something others don’t?
lalos 5y ago
Not only this, but most of the knowledge got recovered from Arabic texts/libraries in the Iberian peninsula after they got kicked out, i.e. Betelgeuse from the constellation Orion is a misspelling/mistranslated. Also, sine and cosine have an interesting history encoded in its Latin name, feel free to research the origins of those words too.
ordu 5y ago
This cuneiform is from 350 to 50 BCE. 350BCE is in the lifetime of Aristotle. 50BCE is long after Archimedes was dead. So it is easily can be that Babylonians learned something from Greeks.
Banana699 5y ago
As an Egyptian those kinds of activist interpretation of history are just endlessly tiring and no less annoying than when/if the occasional Greek-fevered guy or gal think that Greeks invented knowledge in exactly 300 BC. and not a year before. There are many reasons not to descend into this kind of point-scoring: - Zeroth, it's super disrespectful, all of those cultures were the first breath of civilization that we know of. I'm not an emotional guy and I'm fairly pissed off at a lot of aspects of human civilizations, but even I think that the Old Ones deserve more respect than being compared to each other in a fantasy, silly competition that nobody asked for and doesn't serve anything except satisfying petty modern grievances. ("nooo, my ancients could beat up your ancients"). - First, the premise is naive and ahistoric. The modern 'west' was shaped by countless forces, Christianity, Islam's contact, Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, colonialism, etc... Exactly zero (0) of those things happened to Classical Greece, the 'west' would be as alien a civilization to them as Persians. When you start looking for other civilizations achievements to 'offset' the contribution of Greeks, you fail to notice that the Greeks aren't western in any reasonable sense of the word. You have been dragged into a game with fundamentally silly rules. Don't try to win silly games. - Second, civilizations reinvent each other's wheels all the time, there is no reason why the same environment that inspired Egyptian and Babylonian scholars didn't also inspire Greek scholars. - Third, it's exaggerated how much 'white supremacist' actually exist outside of one or more imagination. The term became meaningless. Liking your civilization more is not being supremacist, it's a natural, if misguided, instinct that is present in the vast majority of population of all cultures.

platz 5y ago

does it matter whether you have a heliocentric or a geocentric worldview when using this method?

herodotus 5y ago
No. Babylonian astronomers created arithmetical techniques for predicting key events of the moon and planets, such as the date that Jupiter reached a stationary point in the sky. (The stationary point is the positions where Jupiter starts its retrograde motion). They were not trying to explain the nature of the universe (cosmology). Ptolemy derived cosmological models based on geometry, but even he was interested in prediction, not explanation. In both cases, it does not matter whether the astronomer's view is helio- or geo- centric. Ptolemy used a geocentric model, but he did point out that a heliocentric version was a possible alternative. Even Copernicus was not really that concerned with cosmology: he was showing an alternative to Ptolemy based on the heliocentric view of what he thought was the universe (now known to be the solar system). In my view it was Galileo who really first proposed that these models went beyond prediction to describe the reality of the cosmos.
- trasz 5y ago
  Do we know why they tried to predict, but not explain? Or would prediction simply be a prerequisite for explanation?
  - rosetremiere 5y ago
    I heard (iirc in the “In our time” podcast) that they associated rare/unusual cosmological events (say, a solar eclipse) with signs from the gods. Hence, to better read the signs, you want to know what's normal/predicted. Don't quote me on this, though :)
  - herodotus 5y ago
    The most likely reason was because there was an obvious correlation between astronomical events and things that happened on earth. The most obvious are seasonal weather events, which are obviously important for agriculture. Having noticed that these earthly events correlated with certain astronomical events, it was natural to extend this to predicting other events based on astronomical "omens" such as conjunctions, risings, stationary points and so on. It is likely that Babylonian rulers used astrologers when making decisions such as the best time to attack a neighbour.

gumby 5y ago

To flip this around: I have a chromatography textbook from only 20 years ago that teaches computing the area under the curve using what it called the “plate” method (i.e. draw rectangles inside the curve on the instrument’s printout and then add up their areas).

foob 5y ago
I had a physics professor many years back who told me about how they sometimes used to measure integrals by cutting out the areas of a plot they were interested in and weighing the resulting paper.
- nh23423fefe 5y ago
  But negative area??? Maybe it was printed on complex paper
  - FastMonkey 5y ago
    You could cut the paper along the X axis, and subtract the area below from the area above.

ncmncm 5y ago

We like to think we know who did what in early mathematics, but we really only know about Greeks whose compatriots took the trouble to write down their names. This particular result is contemporary with some of those selfsame Greeks. There is no telling which way advancements moved. Most likely it was both ways, by then. But there had been a long tradition of traveling to Egypt to learn geometry from the masters, and also of not naming foreigners one got things from. Going on two millennia later, Francis Bacon was scrupulous about reserving credit to Al-Haytham for inventing Science as we know it today. People following Bacon were not, so much.