A recent study has revealed that Mesopotamians were using mathematical concepts thousands of years before numbers and writing were invented. The discovery was made through analysis of an 8,000-year-old pottery vessel from the Halafian culture, which lived in northern Mesopotamia between about 6200 and 5500 BC.
Researchers examined thousands of pottery fragments from 29 archaeological sites to track when plants first became a regular subject in human art. They found that many bowls featured flowers with petals in numbers that form a geometric sequence: four, eight, 16, 32 or 64 petals, implying mathematical reasoning.
Professor Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the study's author, said: 'The decoration of pottery and seals in the Halafian culture reflects a high level of mathematical awareness.' He added that by the late 6th and early 5th millennia BC, early village communities had existed in the Near East for some 4,000 years and had reached a high level of economic complexity.
The researchers argued that the development of mathematical thinking created a cognitive awareness of symmetry evident in the vegetal world, which is why flowers, shrubs, branches and trees were depicted on the pottery. Previously, the first records of written numbers emerged in what is now Iraq around 3400 BC by the Sumerians.
