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Comment by freework | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this tablet before, and an not convinced that it is actually the Pythagorean theorem. Its just a tablet with some tick marks inscribed onto it, along with a circular looking thing. It's very much a stretch to say the person who etched those markings intended to express the Pythagorean theorem.

There was a point in time when I was very interested in ancient civilizations from Mesopotamia, but in more recent years I an way less interested in it. The scholarship in that field is just terrible. In my opinion, a lot of the stuff is on par with alien "investigators" and stuff like that, yet for some reason the general public sees the field as totally legit.

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I would argue with you, but you've just produced a bunch of squiggles.

> It's very much a stretch to say the person who etched those markings intended to express the Pythagorean theorem.

No it isn't.

There are legit reasons to question a lot of the research on ancient civs, but that isn't one of them.

How is this different from seeing a fuzzy video of some lights in the sky and then coming to the conclusion that it is definitely a UFO? If you're so convinced that this carving definitely proves that the carver was intending to express the Pythagorean formula, then what is the evidence?

Some people's definition of "evidence" is different from my own. If somebody really wants to believe something, then just about anything qualifies as evidence. This is why UFO people consider literally every single fuzzy video as undeniable proof that aliens exist.

… because those “squiggles” are just “words” in a “language” you can’t “read”?

And if you could read it, you would find it contains a lot of relevant things, concluding with:

> … 1.414213, which is nothing other than the decimal value of the square root of 2, accurate to the nearest one hundred thousandth.

You might then think to yourself:

> The conclusion is inescapable. The Babylonians knew the relation between the length of the diagonal of a square and its side

Which is all clearly explained in the article you’re commenting on. Do you have anything else meaningful to add, beyond “it’s nuffin’ but squiggles mate” and “aliens”?

You sound very confused.

Here is a drawling of what they think this tablet says:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:YBC_7289_sketch.svg

It's just a bunch of numbers scribbled onto a tablet. For all we know it could just be some guy writing down the number of sheep he is willing to sell to his neighbor or something. To say this tablet proves the Mesopotamian knew about Pythagorean's theorem is quite a stretch.

To the people who want to believe, there is nothing that can be said. Believe what you want.

Also, this tablet has no provenance. According to the wikipedia page on this tablet, it says "It is unknown where in Mesopotamia YBC 7289 comes from" Basically it just magically appeared one day. For all we know it could be faked. In any other field, this artifact would be ruled inauthentic. But in this field, for some reason it just doesn't matter.

Imagine for a moment that the people who created the tablet used a different number system than us, and also imagine that we knew that number system and could convert it.

Then those “bunch of numbers” becomes something else entirely. Specifically, they become a bunch of numbers that highly relate to the Pythagorean theorem.

I agree Cuneiform tablets is a multistep process of recording an idea.

I don’t mind the poor scholarship it offers opportunities to have better ideas. What I love about the ancients is that they are just like us with fewer objects.

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