Some academics from Australia have claimed the Babylonians had developed a form of trigonometry more advanced than what we currently have. It allowed them to perform calculations faster and easier and to build structures such as pyramids and temples.
We use a base ten system to count. The Babylonians counted in base 60. At first glance this may seem harder but try split ten into three thirds and you always have some left over. Ten only has two exact fractions (0.5 and 0.2) whereas 60 has far more – e.g. a third of 60 is 20 exactly.
The claims are based on an analysis of Plimpton 322, a 3,700 year old clay table which has been known to show that the Babylonians understood and practised Pythagoras’ famous equation for right-angled triangles and other trigonometric equations long before the Greeks laid claim to them.
(For more on this see Babylonians had advanced form of trigonometry )
Even through we refer to civilisations from a long time ago as ancient, they were far from primitive and in many respects, more advanced than us.
Not only did they have advanced writing skills (when was the last time you told a story by condensing it to a few pictures and carving them on a temple wall?), they built structures that still baffle us and have stood for thousands of years, often with precise astrologicial alignment. Their ability to ferment, preserve and season food without filling it full of harmful chemicals that kill us is far superior to what we have today.
Medical systems such as traditional chinese medicine (tcm) or ayurvedic medicine in the east, developed over thousands of years. Intrinsically, these systems understood that health was based on a whole body approach rather than the narrow and isolationist approach western medicine has adopted. Healing a dis-ease in tcm for example involves rebalancing the body as a whole. It considers the type of person presenting, their food intake, social environment, stress and exercise. Taking all these factors into account, a TCM doctor then presents a herbal formula, acupuncure, exercise and environmental advice. Here in our hospitals, we still serve up highly processed white bread, meats on growth hormones, plants sprayed with pesticides and so on – nearly everything opposite to what health is meant to be about.
Truly mind boggling is the similarities between beliefs, structures and medicine that developed throughout civilisations on different continents. That these civilisations seemed to live in harmony with the earth rather than the mass destruction we inflict upon our surroundings should tell us a lot. We live as if we are detached from our surroundings. An advanced race would live knowing they were an inherent part of the whole and that nothing was separate from any other thing.
Going down to the subatomic level, many beliefs held that we were were not some random event living in a time delineated world but rather we were purposeful beings composed of a vibrational pattern and that the mind was the creator
Some day, somebody somewhere will figure out that there existed an advanced civilisation, functioning with knowledge far beyond what we possess today. Sometimes it seems we are going in full circle.