Claiming the stars. Egyptian Priests facing the Sky (original) (raw)
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Stellar Scientists: The Egyptian Temple Astrologers
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 8, 2021
The paper aims to collect and discuss evidence for astrologers in Egyptian temples during the Graeco-Roman period from several kinds of data, including astrological and astronomical texts, inscriptions, and documentary sources. Material evidence is also considered. It attempts to answer questions of who could act as an astrologer and what knowledge was required to become one. In addition, the paper discusses the position of astrologers in the temple hierarchy and other areas of knowledge in which astrologers were involved.
Ϲελήνη Τοξότῃ: Business and Astrology in the Papyri
"Culture and Cosmos" 17.1, 2013
A private letter on papyrus found in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy. LXV 4483, 194 A.D.) offers a unique instance of practical use of astrology in ancient times. A deep examination of the text and of the astrological event cited in it (a position of the Moon in Sagittarius, particulary favourable for making deals) will be provided, with references to other documents, ancient horoscopes, and literary texts, in order to show how the study of ancient astrology can prove useful to understand texts and artifacts, and how star-gazing was influential in every aspect of everyday life, as often happens even today.
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.
Culture and Cosmos, 2012
Joseph Needham called the Treatise on the Celestial Offices 'a text of the highest importance for ancient Chinese astronomy'. This is no exaggeration, but the title of the Treatise alone shows that it is more than just a summa of ancient Chinese astronomical lore. The term 'Celestial Offices' clearly evokes a direct linkage between the stellar patterns above and the imperial offices and departments of the "celestial" empire below. This was new, of course, since at the time the empire itself was barely a century old. This paper will report on new insights on the text and its socio-cultural context acquired in the process of producing a complete annotated translation into English.
Journal for the History of Astronomy, 2022
This paper presents the edition of three new horoscopes from Athribis in Upper Egypt (O. Athribis 17-36-5/1741), and the reedition of ANAsh.Mus.D.O.633, identified as part of the same group of horoscopes originating from Athribis. The first three horoscopes date to the reign of Augustus (27, 21, and 6 BCE), and the Ashmolean text to year 8 of Cleopatra, 44 BCE. The Athribis group constitutes the earliest attestation of horoscopes from Egypt. They include the date of birth, name, and origin of the native, entries for the two luminaries and the planets, and the position of the four cardines and Places. Relevant features not commonly present in other Demotic horoscopes are a series of lunar dates following the 25-year cycle of P. Rylands IV 589, the complete listing of the Places, Term rulers in the longitudes, and a short phrase that may be connected to the calculation of the length of life.
"Will my child have a big nose?" Uncertainty, authority and narrative in katarchic astrologyy
With his genius for memorable simplifications, Pierre Bourdieu liked to distinguish between two types of anticipation of the future, between that of the Kabyle peasant, apparently secure in his mythico‒ritual habitus, and that of the capitalist world, habituated to – victim of ‒ the management of purely symbolic information. 1 On the one hand, we have the intuitive prévoyance of the Kabyle peasant, who estimates his family's needs for the coming year, setting aside a customary amount of seed‒grain for planting, and treating everything above this as 'superfluity' to be expended for the sake of social and moral capital; and on the other, prévision, the calculation of the uncertain futurities of capitalist economies, which know no such limitations or regularities, and are forced to submit to the implacable demands of profit. Whereas the Algerian peasant's future is concrete, " virtuellement enfermé dans le présent " , that of the modern world, based upon monetarisation, is distant, multiform and abstract. 2 Bourdieu's contrast between Tradition and Capital now looks decidedly quaint, if not Romantic; but if, for the sake of argument, we posit these as poles of a notional continuum of anticipations of the future, where would we place the futures envisaged by the divinatory systems of antiquity? It seems obvious that 1 Abbreviations: CCAG = Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum (Brussels 1898‒1953) SEG = Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum Ep. Chron = Ηπειρωτικά Χρονικά SVF = H. von Arnim