Monday, July 22, 2019

Astronomical Advances before Classical Greece

Long before Classical Greeks like Pythagoras, Babylonians in the first millennium BCE were making revolutionary observations about the universe, according to a review of cuneiform tablets by Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid. ‏

Dr. Al-Rashid notes that between 2000 and 1600BCE, Babylonians "began systematically to record celestial phenomena and their related terrestrial events."

 Some of the tablets, she notes, record "daily astronomical observations in detail, like the position of the moon, occurrences of eclipses, and the location of planets in the sky."

 The takeaway from all this, at least from a world history point of view, is that astronomy and math did not begin with Classical Greece. As Dr. Al-Rashid notes

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