"a practice school exercise undertaken by a novice scribe"

June 3, 2023 1:49 PM

The Best Known Old Babylonian Tablet? is an essay by Janet L. Beery, introduced by Frank J. Swetz, about leading students through a mathematical problem preserved on a nearly four thousand year old Babylonian tablet, which happens to demonstrate that the Babylonians knew the square root of 2. The cuneiform tablet is kept at the Yale Babylonian Collection under the catalog number YBC 7289, and has been scanned in three dimensions and can even be 3D-printed for classroom use. The Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage released a short video where curator Agnete Lassen describes YBC 7289 and Chelsea Graham explains how it was digitized.
posted by Kattullus (15 comments total)

Excellent
posted by Phanx at 1:54 PM on June 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love it when science proves that the ancients were better at math then I.

ironically, I just started reading a book called The library and I'm quite fascinated with the archaeological expeditions of ancient libraries in Nineveh, Elba, Pergamum. Elba specially as it was a huge commercial center around 2500 BCE. It was destroyed twice and after the second time around 1650 BCE it never recovered and the wind claimed the city and their libraries which is kind of neat and it wasn't until the 1970s that it was unearthed revealing more than 20,000 clay tablets.
posted by clavdivs at 2:02 PM on June 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Very cool! It doesn't look like anyone's got a publicly available stl or other file of it that one could print out themselves. But I'll poke around some more just in case.

Math! Pre-Pythagoras pythagorean math! Totally cool. And nobody complaining about mediocre copper, either.
posted by rmd1023 at 2:04 PM on June 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

I think many many more archeological artifacts need to be quality scanned and made available for 3D printing. All the plastic involvement required aside, the world would be a richer place if people could interact with history even in this proxy way.
posted by hippybear at 3:05 PM on June 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

And nobody complaining about mediocre copper, either.

"Or, how to remake classic Simpsons memes into jokes about Sumerian copper merchants delivering substandard ingots"

Previously.

And my favorite comment from another similar post.
"you wish to order copper ingots, please press snake
If you wish to recover a messenger from enemy territory, please press sword
If you wish to complain about a product or service, please press donkey
posted by spitbull at 12:26 PM on March 8, 2015
[117 favorites −]
posted by clavdivs at 3:42 PM on June 3, 2023 [8 favorites]

And nobody complaining about mediocre copper, either.

Almost four thousand years later and everyone still knows Ea-nasir is a jerk.
posted by tclark at 4:37 PM on June 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

We'd call this cancel culture, except we all still know his name.
posted by hippybear at 4:44 PM on June 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

→ It doesn't look like anyone's got a publicly available stl or other file of it that one could print out themselves

Here y'are: 3D Printable The Diagonal of a Square tablet by IPCH Digitization Lab
posted by scruss at 5:00 PM on June 3, 2023 [10 favorites]

clavdivs: I just started reading a book called The library
Who's the author?

I do have to quibble with the title of the essay. I think we all know who is the subject of the "best known" tablet.

Still, it's a good reminder of the wealth of information in that old clay. While the mathematical skill is impressive, I particularly love learning about tablets which reveal how utterly relatable people were, even over four millennia.
Two favorites:

The Buried Book (about the discovery & translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh) has a section on an ancient king who was a hypochondriac - which we know through the anxious interoffice memos of his harried staff.

And Irving Finkel once described a tablet he saw in a private collection One side was written in perfect formed letters.
The flip side had the first few words in a large and sloppy hand... and a sketch of an angry face screaming so dramatically that teeth were flying out...
posted by cheshyre at 6:07 PM on June 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

dammit the teacher said she lost the homework that day why'd you have to go to yale and find it
posted by not_on_display at 7:07 PM on June 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

→ how utterly relatable people were, even over four millennia

It's not on clay tablets, and it's not even 1000 years old, but for anyone who ever doodled in class: Onfim.
posted by scruss at 8:14 PM on June 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

That's amazing. writing stories at six. I'd venture to say a dragon..lohikäärme? Zmei Gorynich? a dragon horse?

Who is the author.
The Library, an illustrated history.. Stewart a. p. Murray. it's one of those overview books which I love, leds to further things, this one got for a quarter at a library sale.
posted by clavdivs at 9:13 PM on June 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

You can make a copy of the tablet without 3D printing; you just need some clay and a chop stick.
posted by jabah at 7:41 AM on June 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

For fans of the other famous tablet, you can now get a bracelet that says "Give me my money back Ea-Nasir" in Akkadian cuneiform (or fake cuneiform english, but who would do that?)
posted by tavella at 11:24 AM on June 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thanks, scruss!
posted by rmd1023 at 5:33 AM on June 5, 2023 [1 favorite]