YBC 7289

Anonymous / tradition (an Old Babylonian scribe or student) · c. 1800-1600 BC (Old Babylonian period; the tablet's excavation findspot was never recorded, as with much of the Yale Babylonian Collection) · Larsa (Iraq) · science

A single small clay tablet showing a square with its diagonals, annotated with a sexagesimal value accurate to the square root of two within six decimal places, argues that Old Babylonian scribes could compute irrational approximations with a precision matched by almost no other ancient culture for over a thousand years. The tablet's own findspot is unrecorded, and Larsa is a conventional attribution.