Archaeologists decipher ancient Babylonian trigonometry tablet

[Larry Davis]

Archaeologists decipher ancient Babylonian trigonometry tablet.

"It's long been accepted that the ancient Greeks were responsible for developing the mathematical concept of trigonometry, but a new discovery indicates they weren't the first to figure it out after all. Scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have shed light on the purpose of a mysterious clay tablet containing a trigonometric table created by the Babylonians a full 1,000 years earlier than Pythagoras – and it's more accurate than our techniques today"


http://newatlas.com/ancient-babyloni...86f42-91266673

[Lutfen]

Interesting news story - thanks for posting.

Michael

[Larry Davis]

Yes it truly is!

It just goes to show that nothing is truly discovered or invented, it's all based upon someone else's previous works. A massive foundation laid by thousands of years of trial and error. It's just when some individual uses that foundation to achieve their "discovery" and allows the accumulated detritus of mankind to bury or camouflage the foundations upon which their hypothesis is based, and does not give credit where credit is due, like Thomas Alva Edison is infamously known for.

As our knowledge base of ancient peoples is expanded, and previous cultural biases are shed, we should be prepared to be amazed and to rewrite histories.

The fire piston is a good example:

"Fire pistons have been used in South East Asia and the Pacific Islands as a means of kindling fire for years. They are found in cultures where the blow pipe is used as a weapon and this suggests they may have developed out of blow pipe construction.[original research?] Their use has been reported from Burma, the Malay Peninsula, Indo-China, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, the Philippines, Madagascar,[2] and South India.[3]

In the West, the first fire piston was made in 1745 by the Abbot Agostino Ruffo of Verona, Italy, who was making a pair of air guns for the king of Portugal, John V. While Ruffo was testing a gun's air pump for leaks by plugging its outlet with a scrap of wood, he noticed that, after he had pressurized the pump, the wood had been scorched. Subsequently he found that tinder was ignited by the pump. Ruffo made an apparatus to study the phenomenon further.[4] An 1876 article in the New York Times claimed that the modern fire piston was reinvented independently in the west through experiments with the air gun, and not modeled after Asian designs.[5]

It is recorded that the first fire piston made its wider debut in front of scientists in 1802,[6] and was patented in 1807 simultaneously in both England and France.[7] Fire pistons, or "fire syringes" as they were called then, were popular household tools throughout Europe during the early nineteenth century, until the safety match was invented in 1844.

The fire piston may have inspired Rudolf Diesel in his creation of the diesel engine around 1892."


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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgKWwGv6y-E


Have a look at the related sites describing the ancient site of Göbekli Tepe, it's truly mind blowing;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2...y-archaeology/


We think we have it all down today and tend to conveniently forget what it was all originally built on. Food for thought....



.

[Lutfen]

All very true! And the sentiment of the following statement is equally applicable to the collecting of Third Reich militaria:

As our knowledge base of ancient peoples is expanded, and previous cultural biases are shed, we should be prepared to be amazed and to rewrite histories.

.

[Jean-Loup]

"We are in debt to our ancestors for the superiority we have over them"