Rudimentary calculus may have taken birth more than a thousand years before than previously thought. Dating back to 350 to 50 BCE, Babylonian clay tablets show case astronomers' calculations when they tracked Jupiter throughout the sky. They preformed it using geometric calculations.

It was thought that the technique that tracks the distance a body travels from a graph of its velocity against time was developed around 1350 in England. However, an astroarchaeologist has described the same kind of computations on older tablets in a paper appeared in the journal Science on Thursday.

On a few tablets, the ancient astronomers have described a trapezoid, a rectangle having a slanted top. In case the astronomers had to graph the velocity of path of Jupiter across the sky against time, the trapezoid would have been seen as the region under the curve.

Study author Mathieu Ossendrijver told The Christian Science Monitor in an interview, “The Babylonians really understood that if you compute the area of this figure, the area of this trapezoid that describes how the velocity changes with time, this area will give you the distance traveled by Jupiter”. Ossendrijver said that it wasn’t unlike what they do in integral calculus when they compute regions under such curves.

He added that there’s no other proof from antiquity showing that astronomers or other scholars did anything like that, and plotted something against time.

Jupiter would have been mainly important for the Babylonians as it was thought to be the manifestation of their supreme god, Marduk. They used to believe that the position of the planet in the sky may foretell a plentiful grain crop, or the level of the river Euphrates, for instance.

Dr. Ossendrijver said that the astronomers, who did such early calculations, would have probably been priests.