Introduction

Babylonian Mathematics is perhaps as old as the civilisation itself. The ancient

Mesapotamia is a civilisation flourished in the fertile valleys lies between the Great
River Tigris and Euphrates. The Greek word Mesapotamia means between the rivers.
Since the first half of the 19th century, some half-million inscribed clay tablets has
been unearthed in the Mesapotamia. At the Nippur excavation site alone, over 50,000
tablets were excavated and many of them are now safely kept in the collection of
museums around the world. Of all the tablets excavated, some 400 tablets have been
identified as strictly mathematicals tablets, containing mathematicals tables and lists
of mathematical problems. The tablets discovered were written in a wedge shaped
character known as Cuneiform. The tablets unearthed vary is size from few square
inches to approximately the size of present textbook. All tablets are made of clay and
baked to harden it, perhaps to make it last longer compared to papyri.

Plimpton 322

Figure 1 : Plimpton 322 (obverse)

Online Image by Christine Proust. All rights reserved.
One of the most famous and remarkable of the Babylonian mathematical tablets yet
analyzed is the Plimpton 322. This tablet was catalouged with the number 322 in the
G.A Plimpton collection at Columbia University. It was written with the Old
Babylonian script, which believed to date somewhere from 1900 to 1600 B.C. The
author of the tablet is still unknown to these days. Plimpton 322 was originally
thought to be a tablet that simply record inventories of food and merchandise but later
in 1946 historian of mathematics Otto Neugebauer and A. J. Sachs discovered that
this tablet was evidence that the numbers in the table were the results of arithmetical

computations and not simply records of quantity; the Babylonian Scribe was doing
some rather sophisticated mathematics.

The tablet suffers some text lost due to the damage on the upper left corner and on the
right side where some portion has come off. Upon examination, crystal of modern
glue were found along the left broken edge of the tablet suggesting that the tablet was
probably complete when excavated, that it subsequently broke, that an attempt was
made to glue the pieces back together and that later the pieces again separated.
However, we were still able to identify a table consist of five columns and fifteen
rows. On the top edge of the tablet is additional script in symbols of a different style
than those can be seen in the table. The symbols on the top edge identified to be
decimals or base ten while the symbols in the table consist of sexagesimal or base
sixty numbers.

The study of the table content reveals that the writing consists of two kinds of
Cuneiform symbols, a thin vertical wedge and a wide horizontal wedge. The fourth
column (column IV) consists of a row of numbers ordered from 1 to 15. Below are the
portions of the four columns with the sexagesimal number and, in brackets, the
decimal equivalent:

Column I (us)

Column II (sag)

Column III (siliptum)

Column IV

1,59,0,15

1,59 [119]

2,49 [169]

1,56,56,58,

56,7 [3367]

3,12,12 [11521] (4825)

1,55,7,41,

1,16,41 [4601]

1,50,49 [6649]

1,53,10,29,

3,31,49 [12709]

5,9,1 [18541]

1,38,33,36,

9,1 [541] (481)

12,49 [769]

1,33,45

45

1,15

11

1,23,13,46,49

56

53 (106)

15

Table 1: Plimpton 322 transliterated.

The heading for Column II is the word sag, roughly solving width likely to mean
computing the shorter leg. Column III is headed siliptum, solving diagonal,
referring probably to compute the hypotenuse of a right triangle. The square of the
column III number minus the square of the column II number thus gives another
perfect square, that is, III2 II2 = I2. In the first row (169)2 (119)2 = (120)2. Its root
is the longer leg or us, which translated as flank (Calinger, 1999).

The middle two columns are actually belongs to sets of Pythagorean triplets except
for a few minor scribal errors with corrections indicated in the table in parentheses. In
line 9 the scribal copyist wrongly transcribed the sexagesimal 9,1 or 541 instead of
8,1 or 481, and in the line 15 the middle right column contains 53 instead of 1,46,
which is double of 53. The magnitude of some numbers indicated that this table was
neither pure guesswork nor the result of trial and error (Calinger, 1999).

The values in column I in the table correspond very closely to triplets derived from
the square ratios (c/b) in right triangles or also known nowadays as the secant
squared. The values decrease regularly a degree at a time. By replacing the first
comma in each number in each number in column I with a semicolon thus reflects a
decrease, in each row from top to bottom, of a degree in ratios that fall precisely
between angles from
and ( )

(row 1) to

(row 15). If the angle is

, then

. On comparison, column I, row 1 on the facing page has the

sexagesimal 1;59,0,,15, which is almost 2 and exactly

. Moreover

about

, and with

(in decimal numbers), a Babylonian approximation of

square, hence a

and

is

angle. Plimpton 322 is thus a systematized collection of

Pythagorean triples (Calinger , 1999).

A great deal of emphasis has been laid on the uniqueness of Plimpton 322; how
nothing remotely like it has been found in the corpus of Mesopotamian mathematics.
Indeed, this has been an implicit argument for treating Plimpton 322 in historical
isolation. Admittedly we know of no other ancient table of Pythagorean triples, but
Pythagorean triangles were a common subject for school mathematics problems in
ancient Mesopotamia (Robson, 2002).

Another fascinating feature of the Plimpton 322 is that, except for lines 11 and 15, all
Pythagorean multiples given in it are relatively prime. Primitive or relatively prime
pythagorean triples have no common integral factor other than 1. For example, (3,4,5)
and (5,12,13) are primitive Pythagorean triples while (6,8,10) is not (Calinger, 1999).
One of the mathematical achievements over a millenium after the date the Plimpton
322 tablet was to show that all primitive Phytagorean triples (a,b,c) are given
parametically by

Where

and

are relatively prime, of different parity, and

, we obtain primitive triple of

; thus, it

and

(Eves, 1990).

The list of Pythagorean triples in the table below obtained when we compute the other
leg

of the integral-sided right triangles determined by the given hypotenuse

leg

on the Plimpton 322 tablet:

120

119

169

12

3456

3367

4825

64

27

4800

4601

6649

75

32

13500

12709

18541

125

54

72

65

97

360

319

481

20

2700

2291

3541

54

25

960

799

1249

32

15

600

481

769

25

12

6480

4961

8161

81

40

60

45

75

2400

1679

2929

48

25

240

161

289

15

2700

1771

3229

50

27

90

56

106

and

One may notice that all of the triples, except the ones in lines 11 and 15, are primitive
triples. This is evidence that the Babylonians of this remote period were acquainted
with the general parametric representation of primitive Pythagorean triples above.

This also confirms that the scribe must have known how to compute such
Pythagorean triples. There must been some systematics procedures as well on how
they obtained moderately large values on the tablet. It is unlikely that they obtained
the value by trial and error alone because this is not a trivial sort of computational
problem. Therefore, Plimpton 322 provides a convincing evidence that the
Babylonian scribe was part of a mathematical culture that understood the relationship
of Pythagorean Theorem, both as a geometric and an arithmetical relationship, about a
millenium before Pythagoras discovered the theorem.

Bibliography
Calinger, R. (1999). A Contextual History of Mathematics. Upper Saddle River, New
Jersey, United States of America: Prentice-Hall.

Eves, H. (1990). An Introduction To The History Of Mathematics (6th edition ed.).

Orlando, Florida, United States of America: Saunders College Publishing.

Robson, E. (2001, October 23). Words and Pictures: New Light on Plimpton 322.
American Mathematical Monthly , 109 (2), p. 105.