Astronomical tablet BM 32234

Not yet translated

This tablet is catalogued and photographed, but no published translation exists yet. Our translation engine works through the untranslated corpus every night, oldest first — this page will update the day its turn comes. If you are a specialist and can read it, we would love your help.

The world it comes from

Persian rule, the long twilight of cuneiform.

Read the Achaemenid Persian chapter →

Scholarly note

Tablet image sourced from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). No scholarly translation referenced in source metadata. Source description: Clay cuneiform tablet. Astronomical, lunar eclipse table for at least 609-447 BC. Dated 4th century BC. From Babylon. Refers to the murder of the Persian king Xerxes I (485-465 BC) by his son. BM 3223

Attribution

Image: Zunkir — Wikimedia Commons. source
Translation excerpted from Wikimedia Commons file: File:Astronomical tablet BM 32234.jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAstronomical_tablet_BM_32234.jpg. Description: Clay cuneiform tablet. Astronomical, lunar eclipse table for at least 609-447 BC. Dated 4th century BC. From Babylon. Refers to the murder of the Persian king Xerxes I (485-465 BC) by his son. BM 32234. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collect.

Related tablets

Related sources

~1800 BCE

Plimpton 322

Whatever its purpose, this single tablet shows that Babylonian mathematicians, working in base-60, had an arithmetic understanding of right triangles a millennium before Pythagoras was born.