Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination.

• Author: Huber, Peter J.
• Position: Reviews of Books

Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination. Edited by N. M. SWERDLOW. Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY PRESS, 1999. Pp. x + 378. $49.95.

This volume collects twelve papers presented during a conference at the Dibner Institute, May 6-8, 1994. They range in subject matter from early Mesopotamian celestial omens to Alexandrian astronomy and provide a unique overview of selected facets of ancient astronomy. All relate to the surprising wealth and diversity of materials that have surfaced in the past half-century and are now complementing the classical Greek tradition. Most of the papers, while technical, should also be accessible to non-specialists.

In her leading paper "Babylonian Celestial Divination," Erica Reiner gives an eminently helpful survey of our current state of knowledge of Babylonian omen astrology. The earliest astronomical omens seem to go back to observed sequences of events (such as a lunar eclipse followed by the death of a king) that occurred in the late third millennium, but the textual evidence is much later, mostly Neo-Assyrian. In the past dozen years our understanding of the material, both of the huge seventy-tablet omen series Enuma Anu Enlil, and of its practical use by astrologers, has vastly improved, mainly thanks to the activities of H. Hunger, S. Parpola, D. Pingree, F. Rochberg, and Reiner herself. These omens predict the fate of countries or of their kings on the basis of various events in the sky, such as eclipses, halos, and so on.

Horoscopes are in comparison a relatively late invention. The earliest preserved Babylonian horoscope concerns a birth in 410 B.C. Francesca Rochberg's paper, "Babylonian Horoscopy: The Texts and their Relations," is a companion and introduction to her edition of the extant cuneiform horoscopes (TAPS 98.1, 1998). She discusses the astronomical content of these horoscopes, their relationship to other texts (the so-called almanacs, which contain entrance dates of planets into zodiacal signs, may have been prepared for horoscopic purposes), and the hypothetical, far from straightforward cultural relations and cross-fertilizations between astrology and early astronomy. In this connection it is curious that the typical Babylonian horoscopes list only the astronomical facts. Perhaps the divinatory parts concerning the fate of the child were derived by someone else, and recorded in a different...