Not quite as ancient but still very cool. "Nicolaus Copernicus bought a copy while at the University of Cracow, and cared about it enough to have it professionally bound with pieces of wood and leather.[9] Alexander Bogdanov maintained that these tables formed the basis for Copernicus's development of a heliocentric understanding in astronomy."

That's a neat example of how "boring" statistical data / record keeping can lead to great scientific results.

Scientific theories are models, and models are based on data.