3,700-Year-Old Clay Tablet Shows We’ve Been Using Geometry For Longer Than We Realized

Si.427, a tablet discovered in 1894 in what is now Iraq, proved to be the key to the conundrum. As he describes for the Conversation, Mansfield discovered the clay relic at the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, where it had been mostly disregarded for decades.

“With this new tablet, we can finally see why they were interested in geometry in the first place: to set down accurate land boundaries,” Mansfield adds in the announcement. “This comes from a time when the property was beginning to become private—people began to conceive of land in terms of my land and your land,’ trying to set an appropriate boundary to have pleasant neighborly interactions.”

Other tablets from the same period add to our understanding of how individuals dealt with land ownership difficulties. A few of them refer to Sin-bel-apply. A conflict between Sin-bel-apply and a wealthy female landowner is described in one of the stories.

“Valuable date palms on the border between their two estates are at issue,” Mansfield said in the statement.

“To resolve the dispute, the local administrator agrees to send out a surveyor.” It’s easy to see how precision was critical in resolving disputes between such powerful people.”