I love history and discoveries like this fascinate me, but do they serve any functional purpose? Does knowing that Babylonians understood angles change anything in my daily or long term life?
Not trying to be critical, just a question I often pose myself but have yet to think of a reassuring answer for.
It might give you new respect for the Babylonians, and act as a corrective to the modern tendency to assume superiority. It might enhance your sense of how similar we all are and how connected, and your kinship with people who lived millennia before you. If little discoveries like this make us just a little more sensitive to the transience of even the most sophisticated societies, the kinship of all people and the sheer length of human history compared to the shortness of our individual lives, it might make us just a little more considerate and respectful in how we treat our world and our peers. The value of such discoveries is their cumulative influence on our understanding of ourselves and how we fit into the world. It makes us wiser.
Well we knew that trig and angles and algebra existed long before the Greeks. Pythagoras took his theorems from Persia.
In terms of perfume together human history finds like this are pretty important though because it helps us fill in gaps in our knowledge
