The mysteries of ancient science

The study of ancient science, a relatively new academic subject, holds surprising promise for understanding history. More than a thousand years before the first telescopes, Babylonian astronomers tracked the motion of planets across the night sky using simple arithmetic. But a newly translated text reveals that these ancient stargazers also used a far more advanced method, one that foreshadows the development of calculus over a thousand years later.  Astroarchaeologist Matthieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin translated an unstudied text on Jupiter and discovered the Babylonians tracked the gas giant’s path across the sky with a geometric technique—the trapezoid procedure—that’s a cornerstone of modern calculus. Until now, this method was believed to have been developed in medieval Europe, some 1,400 years later.