According to a newly translated cuneiform tablet, ancient Babylonian astronomers were the first to use surprisingly modern methods to track the path of Jupiter.
The purpose of four ancient Babylonian tablets at the British Museum has long been a historical mystery, but now it turns out that they describe a method that uses figures on a graph to calculate the motion of Jupiter. It’s a technique that historians previously thought no one came up with until medieval Europe, and it’s a staple of modern astronomy, physics and math.
