Cuneiform Video: 10 Mind-Blowing Ancient Inscriptions Unveiled (2026) — E8 Intelligence Research

**The Tablet Behind the Clickbait: YBC 7289 and the First Known Calculation of √2** If the 2026 video "10 Mind-Blowing Ancient Inscriptions Unveiled" features a clay tablet with a square and crossed diagonals, it is almost certainly YBC 7289, held at the Yale Babylonian Collection. I cannot verify the video's specific object without a transcript or timestamp, and titles of this genre routinely recycle the same handful of celebrity tablets — Plimpton 322, the Rhind papyrus, the Antikythera mechanism. But YBC 7289 is the one that matches the "mind-blowing math" hook, and it deserves the attention. The tablet is small — roughly 8 cm across, from southern Mesopotamia, dated to the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800–1600 BCE). It shows a square with its two diagonals drawn. Along one side is the sexagesimal number 30 (i.e., 30/60 = 0.5 in our notation, but here meaning the side length). Along the diagonal is written 1,24,51,10 — in base 60, that is 1 + 24/60 + 51/3600 + 10/216000 ≈ 1.41421296 Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com