The Babylonians Beat Pythagoras

[Ben]

The Babylonians apparently beat Pythagoras on his theorem by around 1000 years. Theirs seems to be called a "proto-theorem" and was used for land measurements rather than stellar measurements.

One of the most interesting secondary topics to me in the article was that the trig was being used for legal boundaries and land ownership nearly 4000 years ago. Neighbors fighting over their fence lines has been going on for a long time. 

https://www.livescience.com/earliest-form-of-pythagorean-triplet

[MechAg94]

until we find out they learned it from someone who came before whose records are lost. 

I imagine surveying is a pretty powerful need.

[Viking]

The Babylonians apparently beat Pythagoras on his theorem by around 1000 years. Theirs seems to be called a "proto-theorem" and was used for land measurements rather than stellar measurements.

One of the most interesting secondary topics to me in the article was that the trig was being used for legal boundaries and land ownership nearly 4000 years ago. Neighbors fighting over their fence lines has been going on for a long time. 

https://www.livescience.com/earliest-form-of-pythagorean-triplet

And the worlds first customer complaint was written almost 4000 years ago, on a clay tablet, about the quality of copper ingots.

until we find out they learned it from someone who came before whose records are lost. 

I imagine surveying is a pretty powerful need.

I keep reading this idea that the Sphinx in Egypt is far, far older than what is commonly believed. Maybe the ones who built it (if the theory about the age is true) knew it before the Babylonians.

[Ben]

until we find out they learned it from someone who came before whose records are lost. 

For sure. I've been interested in "lost knowledge" ever since seeing a Carl Sagan episode on the Library at Alexandria when I was a kid.

War, plague, catastrophe. Heck, even just crappy record storage allowing documentation to disintegrate. I bet there is a lot of stuff that humans have "newly discovered" multiple times over the history of our species.

This kind of stuff is also what got me so interested in the Silurian Hypothesis.

[MechAg94]

For sure. I've been interested in "lost knowledge" ever since seeing a Carl Sagan episode on the Library at Alexandria when I was a kid.

War, plague, catastrophe. Heck, even just crappy record storage allowing documentation to disintegrate. I bet there is a lot of stuff that humans have "newly discovered" multiple times over the history of our species.

This kind of stuff is also what got me so interested in the Silurian Hypothesis.

One idea I agree with:  If you assume humans have been around more or less as we are for a hundred thousand years or more, I refuse to believe humans were undergoing brain development for all that time up until recently. 

[MechAg94]

And the worlds first customer complaint was written almost 4000 years ago, on a clay tablet, about the quality of copper ingots.

I keep reading this idea that the Sphinx in Egypt is far, far older than what is commonly believed. Maybe the ones who built it (if the theory about the age is true) knew it before the Babylonians.

I figure the mathematics of astronomy have been around for quite some time. 

One youtube video I watched talked about a ~25,000 year procession of the equinoxes and said the Sphinx was originally built with a lion's head and pointed toward the constellation Leo when it was built (on one of the equinox days).  Supposedly it would have pointed toward a different constellation if built when the Egyptians claim. 

I would say some of the stuff people say on youtube is speculation and guesswork, but I don't see that (non-Christian) traditional views are really any better.

[Perd Hapley]

One imagines property lines were even more hotly contested before the Industrial Revolution than they are today. Vastly more people were farming then, and the land was far less productive per acre.

[Devonai]

A rudimentary steam engine, the Aeolipile, was known to the Greeks 2,000 years ago, but was thought to be nothing but a novelty and they failed to recognize its potential.

[RoadKingLarry]

Lots of anachronisms that don't fit the narrative just get shuffled off to the oblivion of storage. The Antikythera Device, Piri Reis map, "Baghdad Battery"...
Everyone knows that prior to the European Renaissance humans were mostly retarded savages, particularly non-Europeans.

[Perd Hapley]

Lots of anachronisms that don't fit the narrative just get shuffled off to the oblivion of storage. The Antikythera Device, Piri Reis map, "Baghdad Battery"...
Everyone knows that prior to the European Renaissance humans were mostly retarded savages, particularly non-Europeans.

That might have been true 50 years ago, but it's certainly not true anymore. These days, the best hook to get people to read/watch history content is to claim you have some secret "real history" that goes against the narrative. Or to suggest that Europeans were just barbarians or moral reprobates/monsters/oppressors compared to the rest of the world.

That battery is very well-known these days, and mainstream history treats the Viking discovery of the New World as settled fact. They're all for Asian or African discovery too, if they can find enough evidence.

[Pb]

In my reading of the Bagdad Battery, it was probably a clay jar for holding scrolls.  The "paper" decomposed and left behind the metal rod used as the scroll handle.

[230RN]

Maybe it was a prehistoric Galvani doing the original frog leg jumping experimet. :)

To me, they look like Galvanic cells, despite the lack of a connection to the tube.   And almost any ion-bearing solution (electrolyte will work.  Even the LeClanche cell (the common carbon-zinc "battery") uses ammonium chloride as an electrolyte.

Seems like a simpler explanation than the rotten documet storage notion.

Of course, there's always the oft-used shotgun explanation that it was a religious artifact.

That always works.

Terry, 230RN