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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Has there ever been a "ancient tablet unravels secrets undiscovered" that contributed to science and not history? I think everyone can safely eliminate this sort of thing in a Bayesian sense.

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The discovery of Pāṇinian grammar by nineteenth-century European linguistic scholars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini#Modern_lin... probably comes close, although of course Pāṇini was never lost or unknown in India.

Possibly antibiotics:

https://theconversation.com/medieval-medical-books-could-hol...

Not quite so old, but 19th Century ship's logs to learn about weather and climate:

https://www.oldweather.org/

Old supernova observations (okay, maybe not vital scientific information, but):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supernova_observati...

Quite old: Edmund Halley used Greek star charts to show that stars move in the sky (relative to Earth). Just very, very slowly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_motion#History

This isn't quite the same thing, but FWIW, during Renaissance times, scholars would rediscover ancient Greek works and legitimately learn "new" mathematics from them. See for instance Diophantus's Arithmetica, which was translated from Greek to Latin and thus rediscovered by the west.

I had to go through a Babylonian secant table and find the error as an exercise. The actual point of the exercise was in determining how the error in calcuation was made.

Figuring out how science was done is still science, even if all you're doing is figuring out how to do the exact same thing but in a different way.

Does the rediscovery of ancient texts that help kick-start the Renaissance count?

https://www.livescience.com/55230-renaissance.html

Maybe not science, but the Rosetta Stone?

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