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.

Almost all use arithmetic, but several make baffling references to trapezoids. Mathieu Ossendrijver, a science historian at Humboldt University in Berlin, finally solved the mystery in a January ...

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 ...