OccultForum.org

Ancient astronomers were tracking planets using maths previously believed to have first appeared in 14th-century Europe...

"The written record gives instructions for estimating the area under a curve by finding the area of trapezoids drawn underneath. Using those calculations, the tablet shows how to find the distance Jupiter has traveled in a given interval of time. Until now, this kind of use of trapezoids wasn't known to exist before the 14th century.
"What they are doing is applying it to astronomy in a totally new way," Ossendrijver says. "The trapezoid figure is not in real space and doesn't describe a field or a garden, it describes an object in mathematical space—velocity against time."

Scholars already knew that Babylonians could find the area of a trapezoid, and that they were quite familiar with the motions of planets and the moon. Previous records show that they used basic arithmetic—addition, subtraction, multiplication and division—to track these celestial bodies.

The tablet "testifies to the revolutionary brilliance of the unknown Mesopotamian scholars who constructed Babylonian mathematical astronomy during the second half of the first millennium B.C.," says Alexander Jones, a professor of the history of the exact sciences in antiquity at New York University.

Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin found the tablet while combing through the collections at the British Museum.

The written record gives instructions for estimating the area under a curve by finding the area of trapezoids drawn underneath. Using those calculations, the tablet shows how to find the distance Jupiter has traveled in a given interval of time. Until now, this kind of use of trapezoids wasn't known to exist before the 14th century..."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... EbzZkkv.99

"Between half a million[2] and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000[3] – 100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection, c. 130,000, followed by the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, the Louvre, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the National Museum of Iraq, the Yale Babylonian Collection (c.40,000) and Penn Museum. Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published"
It makes me sad to think about how much information is lost in there. We spend million of dollars on books like 50 shades of grey, but we are still ignorant of our own past.


On a more positive note.
This video was incorporated into the original article and I think it shows just how complex the math is to demonstrate a pretty easy thought.

Spida wrote:

Using their basic arithmetic, they could have then just divided the distance by the time, and know how fast Jupiter was traveling also.

less accurate calculations