It’s become a common argument for Islamophiles to boast about Islam’s supposedly unique and essential contributions to science and mathematics. While certainly not as ludicrous as the nonsense spouted about “Maori science” and “Aboriginal astronomy”, it’s still over-egged garbage. While occasional bright sparks within Islamic empires produced works of great learning, they did not as a result of Islam, but often despite it.
As Gad Saad and Douglas Murray point out, the supposed “1,001 Islamic Inventions” simply weren’t. Some twit in a turban jumping off roofs in Damascus was most certainly not “the invention of flight”. More often, though, the Islamic conquerors simply appropriated the inventions of better cultures and passed them off as its own.
Algebra, frequently touted as an “Islamic invention”, owes more to Indian mathematics that the brutal Islamic conquerors of India stole just as comprehensively as they did the wealth of Delhi.
But the history of algebra long predates even India. In fact, it’s quite possible that Indian algebra was based on ideas developed in the “cradle of civilisation”, ancient Mesopotamia.
In fact, a great deal of mathematics may have originated in the Fertile Crescent.
Because baked clay tablets with cuneiform symbols impressed are easily preserved, especially in a dry climate, much is known about Mesopotamian mathematics. Some historians think that it is likely that a great deal of the mathematical knowledge of the ancient world, ranging from Rome to China, diffused from Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamian numeration system was based on 60 as well as 10, and scholars can trace this division through many different languages. The most notable reflections of this system today are in the divisions of hours, minutes and seconds in time calculations and in the divisions of degrees, minutes and seconds for angle measurements.
This break at 60 is far more significant than the one at 10. Ten is a simple and obvious number (count your fingers) for reiterating additive values, but the break at 60 represents true place value. Four ancient cultures developed place value, but three of them (Mesopotamia, India and China) had some degree of contact. So the others may have diffused from Mesopotamia.
The only culture that certainly independently developed place value was the Maya. The Maya also independently developed the concept of zero (absent in Mesopotamian maths), probably about a century before its invention in India or Indochina.
Even without zero, the Mesopotamian place-value system provided many benefits, including simple algorithms for the basic arithmetic operations. Furthermore, the Mesopotamians made the logical step of extending the places to numbers smaller than one, just as we do with decimals. Sexagesimal fractions are just as convenient as decimal fractions. They contributed to Mesopotamia’s developing a practical method for finding square roots, essentially the same method once taught in elementary and secondary schools in the United States, but now replaced with the use of electronic calculators.
Mesopotamian mathematicians were the most skilled algebraists of the ancient world. They were able to solve any quadratic equation and many cubic equations.
If they were world leaders in maths, it was once thought that Mesopotamians weren’t much chop at geometry. Part of this idea no doubt originated because some Mesopotamian writings used a value of three for pi, a rounding error that eventually found its way into the Bible (2 Chron. 4:2: “Ten cubits from brim to brim, circular in form, and … its circumference thirty cubits”).
Later discoveries, however, have shown that at least some Mesopotamians used 3.125 for pi, about as good a value as their contemporaries in Egypt had.
But the Mesopotamians also pioneered some of the basics of geometry that have bored the pants off high school students for millennia.
It is clear that the Mesopotamians were the earliest people to know the Pythagorean theorem (Pythagoras, who is known to have traveled in the East, may have learned his famous theorem there). The Mesopotamians also possessed all the theorems of plane geometry that the Greeks ascribed to Thales, including the theorem of Thales: An angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle. It seems unlikely, however, that these mathematicians proved their theorems from first principles, as Thales is said to have done.
About History
So, if you’re reading this and mentally reciting to yourself, “In a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of squares of the other two sides,” well, blame the Mesopotamians.