Antiquitopia

According to Stephanie Dalley of Oxford, whom most of us know from her  Myths from Mesopotamia , the hanging gardens belong to an engineering feat of the Assyrian King Sennacherib rather than the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar.  From the Guardian : She [Dalley] was astonished to find Sennacherib's own description of an "unrivalled palace" and a "wonder for all peoples". He describes the marvel of a water-raising screw made using a new method of casting bronze – and predating the invention of Archimedes' screw by some four centuries. Dalley said this was part of a complex system of canals, dams and aqueducts to bring mountain water from streams 50 miles away to the citadel of Nineveh and the hanging garden. The script records water being drawn up "all day". Recent excavations have found traces of aqueducts. One near Nineveh was so vast that Dalley said its remains looked like a stretch of motorway from the air, and it bore a crucial inscription: ...

The NYTimes reports that there is an exhibit of ancient Babylonian Mathematics at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. Most of the ancient tablets appear to be classroom exercises, yet they may show a very high degree of sophistication, predating many of the Greek insights--such as the Pythagorean theorem--by millennia (or approximately 1500 years). The newspaper article indicates that Greek thought has shaped our own mathematical thought, but that we can see that we owe a great deal more to the Babylonians than previously thought. I should also note that much of our mathematics derives from medieval arabic mathematicians as well. The tablets from Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University will be on exhibit until December 17. Unfortunately, I heard about this too late to take advantage of the exhibit and will not return to NY until after the exhibit closes. But I would love to hear or read people's responses below.