Review of D. Brown, Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology

CM 18, 2000

This is a version of my 2000 book published by Styx-Brill that I have decided to make available now to a wider public. ISBN 978-90-56-93036-3. The book deals with cuneiform astral science and the advent of accurate astronomical prediction. It thus describes the first scientific revolution, when, how and why it took place. Happy reading!

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.

Scholarly interest in divination in general and astrology in particular has increased over the past more than 15 years since this book was printed, as evidenced for instance by the Oriental Institute seminar of 2009 which had divination as its theme. 1 This is true not only for Assyriology but for anthropology, science of religion, classical studies and related fields of research.

2017

Recently much progress has been made in the absolute dating of the old Assyrian and old Babylonian chronologies by combining a new critical edition of the old Assyrian eponym lists found at Kültepe-Kaneš (revised eponym list) with radiocarbon and astronomical dating techniques. this has led to narrowing down the absolute dating of the old Babylonian chronology to the two middle chronologies (Ammī-ṣaduqa year 1 = 1646 or 1638 BC) and to reducing the candidates for the solar eclipse recorded in the Mari eponym chronicle (rel 127) to three eclipses (in 1845 BC, 1838 BC, and 1833 BC). in this paper i use the results of a recent study of the intercalation of the old Assyrian calendar at Kaneš (REL 81-110) to further refine the absolute dating of the chronology of the first half of the second millennium BC. the new evidence suggests that astronomical intercalation criteria like the heliacal rising of the bright star Sirius may have played an important role in establishing the intercalation pattern of the old Assyrian calendar. using the REL to create three different solutions of the old Assyrian calendar at Kaneš (rel 81-110), one for each candidate solar eclipse, i propose that the observed intercalation pattern provides an additional independent argument in support of the low middle chronology. According to the absolute dating of the old Assyrian chronology proposed here Šamšī-Adad was born in 1839 BC (REL 126), in the year preceding the partial solar eclipse of 24 march 1838 BC (REL 127) and he died in December 1767 BC (REL 197), during the eighteenth year of the reign of king Hammurabi of Babylon. this chronology proposal implies that the beginning of the reign of the old Assyrian king Erišum (REL 1) may be dated to 1964 BC.

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. …

Gennady E. Kurtik, 2021

This article pursues two main goals: (1) to reconstruct the history of the 12 zodiac constellation system in the astronomy of ancient Mesopotamia; (2) to reveal traces of this system directly in cuneiform texts. Among the most important circumstances led to appearance of this system: (1) development of ideas about the band of zodiac constellations, including—according to MUL.APIN—the total of 18 (or 17) constellations; (2) usage of the schematic year, containing 12 months, 30 days each, and (3) development of ideas about mathematical or uniform zodiac, subdivided into 12 equal parts, 30° each. A sequence of the so-called Normal stars singled out in the zodiacal band is an additional important source shedding light on the history of the Mesopotamian zodiac. The designations of Normal stars adopted in Astronomical diaries and other texts indicate that the system of 18 constellations was used in Mesopotamia until the end of cuneiform civilization. This means that in the second half of the first millennium BC the system of 18 constellations, adopted in MUL.APIN, and the system of 12 zodiacal constellations, borrowed from Babylonians by Greek astronomers, were used in parallel. It is also shown in the article that the system of 12 zodiac constellations was used in magical and astrological text BRM 4.20, dated back approximately to the last third of the fourth century BC.

Cosmos and Culture 2:1: 61-66, 1998

This review praises Swerdlow’s attempt to show how the parameters underlying the cuneiform mathematical astronomical texts for the five star-planets might be derived from observations not of the accurate locations of the planets’ synodic phenomena, but merely the dates upon which they occurred and in which zodiacal sign. These data more closely match those recorded earlier for the sake of astrological interpretation of planetary phenomena.

The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, 2013