Plimpton 322

Plimpton 322 refers to a mysterious Babylonian clay tablet featuring numbers in cuneiform script in a table of 4 columns and 15 rows. Eleanor Robson, a historian of science, refers to it as "one of the world's most famous mathematical artifacts." Written around 1800 B. C., the table lists Pythagoreans triples - that is, whole numbers that specify the side lengths of right triangles that are solutions to the Pythagorean theorem a^2 + b^2 = c^2. For example, the numbers 3, 4, and 5 are a Pythagorean triple. The fourth column in the table simply contains the row number. Interpretations vary as to the precise meaning of the numbers in the table, with some scholars suggesting that the numbers were solutions for students studying algebra or trigonometry-like problems.
Plimpton 322 is named after New York publisher George Plimpton who, in 1922, bought the tablet for $10 dollars from a dealer than donated the tabMesopotamia, the fertile valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which is now located in Iraq. To put the era into perspective, the unknown scribe who generated Plimpton 322lived within about a century of King Hammurabi, famous for his set of laws that included "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." According to biblical history, Abraham, who is said to have led his people west from the city of Ur on the bank of the Euphrates into Canaan, would have been another near contemporary of the scribe.
The Babylonians wrote on wet clay by pressing a stylus or wedge into the clay. In the Babylonian number system, the number 1 was written with a single stroke and the numbers 2 through 9 were written by combining multiples of a single stroke.