MCT 038, Plimpton 322

Not yet translated

This tablet is catalogued and photographed, but no English translation is stored in this record 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

Hammurabi, the Epic of Gilgamesh, mathematics.

Read the Old Babylonian chapter →

From the same catalogue range (near P254790)

P254790 · ~1800 BCE

Plimpton 322

“A table of fifteen rows, each giving three numbers in sexagesimal (base-60) corresponding to Pythagorean tripl…”

P254789 · ~1800 BCE

MCT 034, Plimpton 318

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Babylonian (ca. 1900-1600 BC)) — MCT 038, Plimpton 322. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).

Attribution

Image: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA (P254790) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no English translation stored at ingestion. P-number P254790..

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.