Cuneiform tablet- ephemeris of eclipses from at least S.E. 177 to 199 (?) MET ME86 11 345

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 →

Scholarly note

Tablet image sourced from Wikimedia Commons (CC0). No scholarly translation referenced in source metadata. Source description: Seleucid; Cuneiform tablet; Clay-Tablets-Inscribed

Attribution

Image: This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art . See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy — Wikimedia Commons. source
Translation excerpted from Wikimedia Commons file: File:Cuneiform tablet- ephemeris of eclipses from at least S.E. 177 to 199 (?) MET ME86 11 345.jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACuneiform_tablet-_ephemeris_of_eclipses_from_at_least_S.E._177_to_199_(%3F)_MET_ME86_11_345.jpg. Description: Seleucid; Cuneiform tablet; Clay-Tablets-Inscribed.

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.