Plimpton 322

Anonymous / tradition (an Old Babylonian scribe or teacher, likely at Larsa) · c. 18th century BC · Larsa (Iraq) · science

A single clay tablet of fifteen rows of numbers is most often read, through columns that appear to encode Pythagorean triples in base sixty, as evidence that Old Babylonian mathematicians understood the relationship later credited to Pythagoras over a thousand years before he was born, though the reading is contested: Robson (2001) argues the columns are a teacher's list of reciprocal pairs, and Mansfield (2017) reads it as an early trigonometric table.