We’ve never escaped the influence of the Babylonians. That there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a full circle, are all echoes of the Babylonian preference for ...

Indiana Jones would be impressed. Thanks to a clue from a 50-year old photograph, a historian has decoded a mysterious trapezoid described on ancient Babylonian astronomical tablets. That previously ...

The ancient Babylonians – who lived from about 4,000BCE in what is now Iraq – had a long forgotten understanding of right-angled triangles that was much simpler and more accurate than the conventional ...

The Babylonian civilization was at its peak roughly 4,000 years ago, with architecturally advanced cities throughout the region known today as Iraq. Babylonians were especially brilliant with math, ...

Ancient Babylonians charted Jupiter’s heavenly motion in a surprisingly modern, mathematically abstract way — a feat that until now was thought to have originated among European scholars who lived ...

A new translation of cuneiform relics from the second millennium B.C. highlights the warnings that astrologers saw in eclipses. By Franz Lidz It was good to be the king in ancient Babylonia, unless, ...

The ancient Babylonians used a complex form of geometry to compute the movements of Jupiter about 1400 years earlier than the invention of the same technique in medieval Europe – a technique that ...

While the Ancient Greeks spent their time searching for meaning in the cosmos, the Babylonians attempted, to quote fictional astronaut Mark Watney, to “science the shit” out of space. The Babylonians ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

Ancient Babylonians attributed prescient meaning to celestial events, a study published this month argues, shedding fresh light on the Mesopotamian people of the second millennium BC. The paper, ...