PAUL SIEVEKING explores Babylonian surveying, a mystery bishop and an epic monkey voyage
PYTHAGORAS PREFIGURED
The Babylonians were using Pythagoras’s Theorem more than a millennium before he was born (in about 570 BC). An ancient clay tablet, named Si.427, shows that Babylonian land surveyors used Pythagorean triples to measure accurate right angles for surveying land. Discovered in 1894 in Sippar, an ancient Babylonian city in central Iraq, Si.427 sat in a museum in Istanbul for over a century until Australian mathematician Dr Daniel Mansfield uncovered its meaning. “Si.427 dates from the Old Babylonian (OB) period – 1900 to 1600 BC,” he said. “It’s the only known example of a cadastral document from the OB period, which is a plan used by surveyors to define land boundaries. In this case, it tells us legal and geometric details about a
