Add zero and one to get one, one and one to get two, one and two to get three, two and three to get five. Most of us know this—that each successive number is the sum of the two numbers that came ...

Using numbers scrawled by Bronze Age merchants on 4,000-year-old clay tablets, a historian and three economists have developed a novel way to pinpoint the locations of lost cities of the ancient world ...

On a set of broken clay bowls from northern Mesopotamia, delicate flower patterns have turned out to be something far more radical than decoration. New analysis of this ancient art suggests that early ...

An ancient Indian manuscript full of mathematical calculations has been found to be the earliest recorded use of the number “zero.” Bodleian Libraries Researchers are challenging a claim that an ...

Plimpton 322 at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York. (Credit: UNSW/Andrew Kelly) Researchers in Australia say an ancient Babylonian tablet that’s considered the ...

As he sees it, Halafian farmers built a tracking system using clay tokens, seals and circular disks. These diverse shapes served as an early form of bookkeeping, with each object representing a ...