The find, described on Thursday in the journal Science, reveals that Babylonians tracked Jupiter by calculating the areas of trapezoids they used to symbolize the planet’s motion across the sky.

In the service of astrology, Babylonian priests wrote instructional texts on cuneiform tablets, many of which still survive. Almost all use arithmetic, but several make baffling references to ...

The landscape changes as lines take shape to form simple geometric designs: trapezoids, straight lines, rectangles, triangles, and swirls. Some of the swirls and zigzags start to form more ...