Mathematical Cuneiform Tablet, 19th century BCE

Cuneiform tablet dated to the 19th century BC, found among the large archive recovered from Tell Harmal. It is a school exercise in surveying based on a rightangled ‘Pythagorean’ triangle. It depends for its solution on the Euclidean principle that ‘In a right-angled triangle, if a perpendicular is drawn from the right angle to the hypotenuse, the triangles on either side are similar to the whole triangle and to one another’.

Ht 10 cm.

Iraq Museum.

See also-

• Mathematical Tablet from Ebla, c.2350-2250 BCE
• Mathematical Tablet, c. 1790 BCE
• The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, 1575 BCE
• Tell Harmal Mathematical Tablets
• Polygon Tablet
• Clay Multiplication Table