Potts 2018 [app. 2020]. 'Observatorium in Bagdad constructum:' The observatory of 'Babylon' from Ctesias to Louis XVI. The Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies/ La Société canadienne des études mésopotamiennes Journal 13: 5-14. (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
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.
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
This contribution explores performative aspects of Assyrian celestial divination and Babylonian astronomical diaries and related texts during the first millennium BCE. While the sources for Assyrian celestial divination contain much evidence about observational and ritual performances, astronomical diaries and related texts are mainly concerned with observation and prediction. It is argued that the Assyrian evidence can shed light on some poorly documented performative aspects of astronomical practices in Babylon.
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.
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. …
THE BABYLONIAN ASTRONOMICAL DIARIES: A GRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THEIR IMPLIED REFERENCE SYSTEM
2016
The intent of this study is to describe the directional relations employed in the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries and visually demonstrate their function with charts showing positions of the Moon, planets and stars as viewed on dates corresponding with diary entries. The Babylonians observed and recorded celestial events each night for over six centuries during the first millennium BC. A number of cuneiform tablets containing these astronomical diaries have been recovered and were later translated by Abraham Sachs and Hermann Hunger. The majority of diary entries track the position of the Moon with reference to 31 "normal stars," all within 10 degrees of the ecliptic. Entries specify the moon as being "above," "below," "in front of," or "behind" a second body by a specified distance in "cubits." The extant tablets fail to adequately define the reference system used for the topographical relations. Computer-generated star-charts that are specific for the date and location of selected diary entries show a general interdependence between the topographical relations and the celestial course of the Sun, Moon, and planets. John Steele has discussed the Babylonians as having considered the Moon and planets to move through the zodiac within their own individual bands. This is considered with regard to graphical data that represents a distinct correlation between diary descriptions and the path of the general direction of ecliptic travel.
Babylonian Astronomy: Editing and Interpreting an Ancient Science
K. Chemla, A. Keller, (eds.), Shaping the Sciences of the Ancient and Medieval World. Textual Criticism, Critical Editions and Translations of Scholarly Texts in History, Springer, 523-556, 2024
The year 1881 marks the birth of Babylonian astronomy as a modern area of scholarship with the first publication about this topic. From the outset, its scholarly practices were based on a variety of methods rooted in Assyriology, astronomy, mathematics and the history of science. In this chapter, the editing practices that were applied to Babylonian astronomical texts and their relationship to research methods in the abovementioned disciplines are traced through the works of the main scholars who were active in the field of Babylonian astronomy between 1881 and 1955. In this period, two phases can be distinguished: a pioneering phase (1881–1935) in which mainly individual tablets were edited while editing practices remained fluid, and a subsequent phase characterized by the appearance of standard editions of complete and coherent corpora of texts. In both phases, the translations and interpretations were strongly shaped by modern mathematics and astronomy.
R.J. van der Spek, "The Challenge of the Astronomical Diaries from Babylon: Authors, Concern, Scholarship, and Worldview Reconsidered", Journal of the American Oriental Society 142.4 (2022) 975-981, 2022
The Astronomical Diaries are a unique corpus of documents from Babylon containing daily observations of celestial and terrestrial phenomena in the last half millennium before the common era. They provide direct information on how Babylonian scholars conducted scientific research and viewed political, economic, and religious events of their time-in other words, how they experienced their era. The book under review is a good introduction to this corpus. This is a review article of: Johannes Haubold, John Steele, and Kathryn Stevens eds., Keeping Watch in Babylon: The Astronomical Diaries in Context. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019.