The Plimpton 322 Tablet and the Babylonian Method of Generating Pythagorean Triples

Abstract

Ever since it was published by Neugebauer and Sachs in 1945, the Old Babylonian tablet known as Plimpton 322 has been the subject of numerous studies leading to different and often conflicting interpretations of it. Overall, the tablet is more or less viewed as a list of fifteen Pythagorean triplets, but scholars are divided on how and why the list was devised. In this paper, we present a survey of previous attempts to interpret Plimpton 322, and then offer some new insights that could help in sharpening the endless debate about this ancient tablet.