[freework]

Here is a drawling of what they think this tablet says:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:YBC_7289_sketch.svg

It's just a bunch of numbers scribbled onto a tablet. For all we know it could just be some guy writing down the number of sheep he is willing to sell to his neighbor or something. To say this tablet proves the Mesopotamian knew about Pythagorean's theorem is quite a stretch.

To the people who want to believe, there is nothing that can be said. Believe what you want.

Also, this tablet has no provenance. According to the wikipedia page on this tablet, it says "It is unknown where in Mesopotamia YBC 7289 comes from" Basically it just magically appeared one day. For all we know it could be faked. In any other field, this artifact would be ruled inauthentic. But in this field, for some reason it just doesn't matter.

[orf]

Imagine for a moment that the people who created the tablet used a different number system than us, and also imagine that we knew that number system and could convert it.

Then those “bunch of numbers” becomes something else entirely. Specifically, they become a bunch of numbers that highly relate to the Pythagorean theorem.