The world's first architect?

 The Telegraph:

A Sumerian “sacred code” has been deciphered, revealing divinely inspired building instructions echoed in the Bible.

Experts have been puzzled since unearthing the 4,000-year-old statue of a leader called Gudea, which features an architectural plan, an inscription claiming he built a temple commanded to him in a dream, and a “ruler” of undeciphered measurements.

British Museum archaeologists have now cracked the “sacred code” of these mysterious measurements after finding a lost temple in Iraq, which they have established to be the divinely mandated holy site mapped out by Gudea’s plan.

The discovery of the temple in the ancient city of Girsu in Iraq allowed experts to test their theories about the “ruler” measurements, and establish that it marked out an extremely precise and to-scale representation of the Sumerian holy site.

Dr Sebastien Rey, director of the British Museum’s project in Iraq, said: “It is like the precise measurement we see in the Bible in a much later period, those of the Arc, or the Temple of Solomon.”

He added: “This has taken 140 years to crack, it is a very important moment.

“Mathematics would have seemed divine to the Sumerians. This was a sacred mathematics on architectural plan, a sacred code.

“This shows that Gudea did indeed build a temple after being told to do so in a dream, and reveals that Sumerians were capable of scaling models up and down. The plan matches the temple site perfectly.”

The team recently unearthed a fragment of a tablet in a ruined palace complex which bears similar measurement markings, and could prove to be another architectural plan, suggesting the widespread use of these ancient “blueprints”.

The Sumerian civilisation was the world’s first, inventing writing, numerical systems, bureaucracy and the state, and texts from the 3rd millennium BC provide details of a particularly cultured ensi (priest-ruler) called Gudea.

The ruler governed the now ruined city of Girsu in southern Iraq, where French archaeologists in the 19th century first rediscovered the Sumerian civilisation and pulled several statues of Gudea from the clay.

One of these shows the ruler sitting with an architectural plan on his lap which has a “ruler” running along one side, complete with an inscription proclaiming that he was instructed in a dream by the Sumerian god Ningirsu to rebuild his temple in the 21st century BC.

The measuring “ruler” appeared like a tally going up in marks from one line to six lines before stopping, in a system that has perplexed experts for more than a century.

Dr Rey’s team worked on a theory that, unlike distance where numbers keep going, the Sumerian system worked more like time on a clock, getting so far before the measuring began again. The ancient architectural plan would therefore be divided into repeating fractions of distance.

In 2022, the British Museum working in Girsu in Iraq unearthed a vast temple complex which they believed must have been dedicated to the city’s patron deity, Ningirsu, and its vast outer walls appeared to correspond almost exactly to the architectural sketch on Gudea’s statue.

They then mapped on to the newly unearthed site the fractional measuring system they had been theorising, and realised that it worked perfectly and the site was divided into distances of “one to six” in the Sumerian system, whose terminology is unknown, with each unit corresponding to around eight modern metres.
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I recall one of my math teachers talking about the wonders and fun of math problems.   It looks like the historical records support that theory.