Mesopotamian Astral Divination: Re-examining the Anti-religious Demarcations of Science (original) (raw)

The relation of Babylonian astronomy to its culture and society

Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 2009

Babylonian astronomy is quite different from astronomy as it is customary today. We have to reconstruct it exclusively from texts and a few schematic drawings accompanying them. No instruments related to astronomy have been found. These texts are written on clay tablets in cuneiform script which was used in the Near East from ca. 3000 BCE to 100. It was completely forgotten and only deciphered in the middle of the 19th century. Since then, hundreds of thousands of clay tablets have been found in archaeological excavations, mostly in present-day Iraq. Among these are a few thousand tablets related to astronomy. Many have been published, but more still need to be worked on. And of course an unknown number of such texts is still buried under the sands of Iraq.

Astronomy in the Ancient near East

Journal for the History of Astronomy, 2014

ASTRONOMY IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST Poetic Astronomy in the Ancient Near East: The Reflexes of Celestial Science in Ancient Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, and Israelite Narrative. Jeffrey L. Cooley (Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Indiana, 2013). Pp. x + 396. $54.50. ISBN 978-157506-262-4.It is perhaps difficult to imagine the impact the recovery of ancient Mesopotamian culture had on the Western world in the late nineteenth century. In 1872 when George Smith, then an assistant in the British Museum, discovered the Assyrian version of the biblical flood story, it is said he "jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself".1 Equally momentous was the discovery of Babylonian astronomy, first made public in 1881 by the Jesuits Joseph Epping and J. N. Strassmaier.2 Each of these discoveries fuelled cultural diffusionist ideas about Babylonian origins, not only of stories in the Bible, but of world mythology, astronomy and astrology. Such ideas had a temporary but widespread influence through the school of Pan-Babylonism, a short-lived sport (in the botanical sense) of mostly German nineteenth-century Orientalism.Jeffrey Cooley's Poetic astronomy in the ancient Near East begins and ends with discussion and critique of the Pan-Babylonists, who read Near Eastern mythology as astronomical allegory and anachronistically attributed to those stories great astronomical knowledge, supposedly dating to c. 3000 b.c., but in fact only emerging either in the latter half of the first millennium b.c (the zodiac) or not at all (precession). Some participants in the school (Hugo Winckler) were also involved in the so-called Bibel-Babel controversy which inflamed scholarly opinion and found a formidable opponent in F. X. Kugler, s.j., one of the founding fathers of Babylonian mathematical astronomy. Kugler published an article entitled "On the ruins of Panbabylonism",3 a clever pun on Claudius James Rich's important memoir On the ruins of Babylon (1818), and followed it up with a monograph, Im Bannkreis Babels: Panbabylonistische Konstrucktionen und religionsgeschicltliche Tatsachen (1910), which demolished all credibility of the pan-Babylonists regarding the history of astronomy.One of the detrimental effects of Pan-Babylonism, besides the dissemination of highly fanciful and erroneous interpretations of natureand star-mythology and claims of the diffusion of such ideas from Babylonia to the rest of the world, was to drive a long-lasting wedge between scholars of Babylonian astral science and those of cuneiform literary texts. After Kugler's demolition of pan-Babylonist claims, the very idea that mythology and astral science might have some intertextual resonance became virtually anathema and no Assyriologist in his or her right mind would touch the subject for nearly one hundred years. This division has been slowly eroding in the last generation, and Cooley's study can be viewed as a culmination of this change in attitude. Poetic astronomy in the ancient Near East removes that wedge, provides a corrective to Pan-Babylonism (p. 87), and considers the cultural continuities between narrative and technical literatures, not only of the cuneiform world, but those of ancient Ugarit and Israel as well. The book's thesis is that contemporary knowledge concerning the heavens is indeed found in ancient Near Eastern literature, thus reflecting a cultural matrix in which science and literature are not separate.Taking up Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, and Israelite traditions in turn, as is laid out methodologically in the first chapter, Cooley surveys each and discusses what is now known about celestial science in these distinct yet not unrelated cultures, and analyses their narrative texts in the light of their particular intellectual backgrounds. Chapter 2 usefully surveys the various classes of astronomical/astrological cuneiform sources, from divinatory to astronomical texts, making critical use of David Brown's PCP (prediction of celestial phenomena) paradigm and EAE (Enuma Anu Enlil) paradigm to bring historiographic structure to the long chronological span of the sources. …

From Celestial Omens to the Beginnings of Modern Astrology in Ancient Mesopotamia

The Babylonian Sky, Vol. 1, 2024

This interdisciplinary study benefits Assyriologists as well as historians of astronomy and astrology. It analyses all the cuneiform sources that use the terms DUR, ṭurru (DUR) or GU to describe celestial phenomena, and it derives their specific meanings in their different contexts. In particular, the investigation of the logogram dur in astrological texts has consequences for the history of astrology. Now we see that this, as well as other elements of early horoscopic astrology described by Greek astrologers and hitherto thought to have been invented by them, had already been developed by the Babylonians. It used to be assumed that all three terms (DUR; ṭurru; GU) share the same basic idea, namely the description of a kind of “band” in the sky in which stars and planets can occasionally be seen. However, a closer look at the relevant text passages makes it clear that this cannot be the case. The terms refer to different types of astral units: planets including the Sun and the Moon (DUR; ṭurru; GU); constellations or parts of them (ṭurru; GU); individual stars (ṭurru). In addition, they appear in different text genres: in celestial omens (DUR; ṭurru; GU), in astronomical texts (DUR; ṭurru; GU and modifications such as GU-SI.SÁ-DÚB.BA and GU-TU.LU) and in astrological texts (DUR; GU). Each term, therefore, describes a different phenomenon. The Babylonian Sky This new series of ISLET, edited by Jeanette C. Fincke, explores cuneiform texts relating to the sky. According to the Mesopotamian understanding, this includes all celestial bodies as well as weather phenomena, but also all terms used in connection with their description. The textual sources in question span more than three millennia, with the bulk of them dating to the second and first millennium BCE. In this series, the text sources are prepared in such a way that not only Assyriologists, but also historians of astronomy and astrology can benefit from them.

The Coordinate System of Astronomical Observations in the Babylonian Diaries

A large number of the astronomical observations in the Babylonian diaries are occurrences of close conjunctions of moving objects, such as the Moon or planets with bright stars, in the vicinity of the ecliptic. In , Graßhoff proposed the hypothesis that the observations fit best when one assumes that the Babylonians used an ecliptical coordinate system. In the following we present a test that excludes an equatorial coordinate system as an alternative system of measurement. Ein Großteil der astronomischen Beobachtungen in den Babylonischen Tagebüchern han-delt von Konjunktionsereignissen sich bewegender Objekte, wie dem Mond oder Planeten mit hellen Sternen in der Nähe der Ekliptik. argumentierte Graßhoff, dass die Beob-achtungen am meisten Sinn ergäben, wenn man davon ausginge, dass die Babylonier ein ekliptikales Koordinatensystem nutzten. Im Folgenden stellen wir einen Test vor, der ein äquatoriales Koordinatensystem als alternatives Messsystem ausschließt.

Greco-Babylonian Astral Science in Asia: Patterns of Dissemination and Transformation

East-West Encounter in the Science of Heaven and Earth天と地の科学—東と西の出会い, 2019

Greco-Babylonian astral science had a wide dissemination throughout Eurasia during the first millennium CE. The traditional model proposed by Neugebauer, Pingree and Yano revealed how certain unique astronomical and astrological ideas spread unilaterally to India and China under different guises. This paper proposes an supplementary model where scientific notions exemplified in culturally hybrid astral texts such as the Yavanajātaka, Gārgīyajyotiṣa, Xiuyao jing 宿曜經, and Qiyao rangzai jue 七曜攘災決, are treated as conglomerates of smaller packages of knowledge rather than texts representing unique monolithic traditions. These bodies of foreign knowledge invariably interacted with the indigenous systems, in India and China where an astronomical tradition was already firmly established and a process of negotiation thus ensued. Different strategies were developed to absorb certain aspects of the foreign knowledge into the indigenous ones.

An Analysis of the Roles and Relationships Between Cosmology and Divination in Ancient Mesopotamia

In Mesopotamian culture, the general cosmological consensus was a belief in an ordered universe created by deities possessing various powers and agendas, many of which involved dealings with human beings. The gods and goddesses gave signs that provided guidance for people to be able to properly navigate through their structured world. These numerous and varied divine signs were usually interpreted by specially trained persons through methods of divination. Although cosmologically ordered, the Mesopotamian world was not static nor was it usually fatalistically determined. Divination provided a means by which an individual may know a deity’s determination on a wide variety of subjects and perhaps even avoid a negative fate by responding positively via avoidance or other divinely prescribed remedies. The origins of all things from the universe and the natural world to agricultural methods and garment making, as well as divination itself, were all viewed as parts of a divinely ordered cosmology. This essay will discuss texts concerning origins, divinatory methods, and explore cosmological roles in relationship to the popular practice of divination in Mesopotamia.

Science in Action: Networks in Babylonian Astronomy

E. Cancik-Kirschbaum, M. van Ess, J. Marzahn (eds.), Babylon – Wissenskultur in Orient und Okzident, 2011

Like no other cultural achievement, astronomy stands out as a legacy of Babylon. The Chaldaean astronomer, a stock character of the biblical and classical literature, is the personification of that legacy. 1 In this contribution I investigate the astronomers of Babylonia as participants of a network of interacting scholars. With this approach I hope to expand our knowledge of the practice and context of Babylonian astronomy, which is still rather limited. Babylonian astronomers created a large and diverse body of literature consisting of observational astronomy, mathematical astronomy, zodiacal astrology, and omen astrology. 2 Especially the observational texts, by far the most numerous group, imply that astronomy was the collaborative effort of a community of scholars. Since most astronomical diaries contain observations for 6 months, they must have been compiled from individual reports of different scholars. The same holds for other compilations extracted from the diaries, some of which contain data for many decades. Also the fact that observational texts, unlike other scholarly texts, are anonymous (with very few exceptions; cf. below), can be viewed as a consequence of the collaborative effort by which they were produced. Astronomical diaries and related texts are therefore testimonies of a systematic, collaborative program of observation. This program is believed to have existed continuously from the Neo-Babylonian era, perhaps as early as the middle of the 8th c. BC, until the very end of cuneiform writing in the 1st c. AD.

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

Performative Aspects of Assyrian Celestial Divination and Babylonian Astronomical Diaries

A. Brita , J. Karolewski , M. Husson, L. Miolo, H. Wimmer, (eds.), Manuscripts and Performances in Religions, Arts, and Sciences, Studies in Manuscript Cultures 36, 39-54, 2023