When discussing the Babylonian history, we refer to the land area between Tigris and Euphrates rivers northward to Assyria. We must also consider a non-Semitic tribe called the Sumerians. They dwelt in the land of Sumer at the head of the Persian Gulf coming from the mountainous region to the east. They developed a numeral system in the 28th century B. C. and because of the deprivation of stones in their environment, resorted to bricks.
They wrote on clay tablets with round and pointed sticks which resulted in wedge-shaped or cuneiform characters. These clay tablets after being written on were baked by fire or in the sun which preserved it well to this day. The records for these tablets proved that nearly 3000 years before Christ, the Sumerians were already aware of bills, receipts, notes and systems of measure. In here we also find evidence to an approach to a scientific calendar, though later than the Egyptians, which use for the very first time a counting scale of 60.
Sargon the great ruler ruled in about 2750 B. C. He began his rule in Akkad which is a district north of Sumer. During his reign, records of eclipses were found indicating that the numeral system used at the time must have been well advanced. Another great ruler of this time period was Hammurabi or Hammurapi who reigned in 2100 B. C. Around the time the world’s first code of laws was written in which the calendar was reformed. Some remains found from his time were the ruins of the oldest known school-house discovered by French archaeologists in 1894.
The Essay on Time Writing Write Due
My writing is like a little kid telling a story. All little kids do when telling a story is exaggerate on all the details. "They walked miles."They ate tons." The monster was as big as a house." , every time I write I use my own form of exaggerating, procrastination. I am always the last minute student when it comes to work. Given I complete things well they are usually just barely on time or ...
Amongst the tablets that were found was evidence of the knowledge of the Babylonians in arithmetic. Despite their unusual numeral system, archaeologists concluded that these early Babylonians had some knowledge of computation, mensuration and commercial practices. The period in which many of these tablets were found is known as the Old Babylonian period and hence called Babylonian mathematics. I will now analyse the evidence found from this time period which was in the form of cuneiform tablets.
The first evidence of Babylonian arithmetic originated from two tablets found in 1854 at Senkereh, the ancient Larsa, on the Euphrates by a British geologist. These tablets contain the squares of the numbers from 1 to 60 and the cubes of the numbers from 1 to 32. The time period where they came from is unclear but evidence suggests the Hammurabi period in 2100 B. C. Since then about 50,000 tablets were uncovered in Nippur, an ancient city lying to the south of Babylon, and many of them are relative to mathematics.
These tablets were from a library which seems to have been destroyed by the Elamites about 2150 B. C. and contains the most extensive mass of ancient mathematics material ever brought to light. Amongst these works include multiplication and division tables, tables of squares and square roots, geometric progressions, computations and work of mensuration. Studies conducted in 1935 on these tablets show that the Sumerians and Babylonians could solve special linear, quadratic, cubic and biquadratic equations and were aware of negative numbers.
One of the most remarkable discoveries from the Babylonians was their use of the number 60. A use that is relevant to this day in our division of degrees, hours and minutes into sixty sub-units. The Babylonians early came to believe that the circle of the year consisted of 360 days. It was also thought that they knew that the side of the regular hexagon is equal to the radius of the circle, the property suggesting the division of 360 into 6 equal parts and therefore 60 is looked upon as a kind of mystic number.
The Essay on Development of Egyptian Pyramids from Sumerian Ziggurats
The Egyptian pyramid structures represent a great range of civilization techniques that have been used in various other parts such as in Rome and Greece. This is despite the fact that the eventual architectural construction of pyramids in Egypt took place in slow transitional steps during the 3rd transition to a unique Egyptian character and permanency in the 4th dynasty although the “idea was ...
There was found no apparent reason for the use of 60 besides its integral divisors being 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30, hence reducing work with its fractional parts. It is fair to mention an important tablet found in 1920 which dates back to 2000 B. C. and shows the Babylonian custom of using 360 or 60 for the denominator except in cases of unit fractions and of fractions in which the numerator is 1 less than the denominator. For example, 60/360 can be written as 10/60 or 1/6. Egypt was joined under a single ruler by 3000BC and it was well suited for civilisation.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2650BC and perhaps in building this they discovered the golden ratio and perhaps pi. They wrote with ink on papyrus, which did not preserve the tablets well. The Egyptian calendar containing 12 months of 30 days each plus 5 feast days in the year 4241 B. C shows a high development of computation as well as of astronomy. This might be the very first evidence of mathematical progress ever as it dates way back to the Stone Age. It is believed that our calendar is just a poor mimic of this ancient Egyptian one.
In about 3000 BC, we discover a period of rapid development in the area of practical engineering. Professor Breasted described this period of civilization in these words: “Hardly more than a generation before this 30th century the first example of hewn stone masonry was laid, and in the generation after this 30th century the Great Pyramid of Gizeh was built. With amazingly accelerated development the Egyptian passed from the earliest example of stone masonry just before 3000 BC to the Great Pyramid just after 2900.
The great-grandfathers built the first stone masonry wall a generation or so before 3000 BC and the great-grandsons erected the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, within a generation after 2900… One finds it difficult to imagine the feelings of these earliest architects…as they paced off the preliminary plan and found an elevation in the surface of the desert which prevented them from sighting diagonally from corner to corner and applying directly a well-known Egyptian method of erecting an accurate perpendicular by means of measuring off a hypotenuse….
The Term Paper on Who Built the Great Pyramid Giza
It’s the oldest and the only surviving of the Seven Wonders of the World. It is the Great Pyramid of Giza. It doesn’t need any speculations in reference to the appearance, size, or shape. It is located in the city of Giza, a necropolis of ancient Memphis, and today it is part of Cairo, Egypt. The Great Pyramid of Giza is believed to have been built over a 20 year period. First, the site was ...
The Egyptians engineers early learned to carry a straight line over elevations of the earth’s surface, or a plane around the bends of the Nile. In his endeavour to record the varying Nile levels in all latitudes the Egyptian engineer was confronted by nice problems in surveying, even more exacting than those which he met in the Great Pyramid. A study of the surviving nilometers has disclosed the fact that their zero points, always well below lowest water, are all in one plane.
This plane inclines as does the flood slope from south to north. The Pharaohs’ engineers succeeded in carrying the line in the same sloping plane, around innumerable bends in the river for some seven hundred miles from the sea to the First Cataract. ” A common conclusion comes about the Great Pyramid is that some sort of mathematics magic played a role in its design but the underlying principle of it all is not known to this day.
Evidence suggests that the pyramidal face was formed by four equilateral triangles put together due to the base being longer than the sloping edge. Secondly, it was believed that the ratio of the side to half the height is the approximate value of pi, or that the ratio of the perimeter to the height is 2?. This gives the value of pi as 3. 14 which might have been known to the builders but no strong evidence has been found that suggests this. However, if one looks in buildings for lines of this ratio, they are not hard to find which can suggest otherwise.
