History by Computer

Giant computers have built much of their reputation by serving as the brains behind the world's intricate weaponry.

But they are also capable of engaging in more innocent pursuits. At International Business Machines Corp., one of the more complicated computers recently spent 40 hours calculating the motions of the moon, sun and planets for 600 years as they cruised over ancient Babylon.

The Babylonians and their predecessors in Mesopotamia believed that the motions of the heavenly bodies had an intimate influence on human affairs. When they recorded current events--the start of a war, say, or a drop in the price of barley--they were likely to include the position of the moon on that day. or the location of a couple of planets. Today, if a scholar studying the clay tablets of ancient Babylon wants to know the exact date of a given event, all he has to do is to calculate the date when the heavenly bodies were in their recorded positions.

For years scholars have known about this dating system, but tracing astronomical motions backward for more than 2,000 years is forbiddingly time consuming for slow-working human brains. So Mathematician Bryant Tuckerman of IBM got time on a 704 computer. In 40 hours of electronic calculation the 704 riffled through reams of arithmetic and disgorged 301 tables of figures showing the positions of the moon, Venus and Mercury at five-day intervals, and of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the sun at ten-day intervals between 601 B.C. to A.D. I. The orbital equations used by the monster computer gave results that are accurate to less than one hour.

Scholars who can read the cuneiform writing of ancient Babylon are already hard at work with Dr. Tuckerman's tables. Eventually they may check the dates of such events as Nebuchadnezzar's deportation of the Jews or Cyrus' capture of Babylon--sometimes, perhaps, to the very hour, Babylon Standard Time. They hope to reconstruct a detailed history of the almost forgotten Babylonian civilization, out of which grew the culture of Greece and modern Europe.

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