Babylonian Horoscopes.

• Author: STEELE, J. M.
• Position: Review

Babylonian Horoscopes. By FRANCESCA ROCHBERG. Transactions of the American Philological Society, vol. 88.1. Philadelphia: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, 1998. Pp. xi + 164, illus. $20.

In Babylonian Horoscopes, Francesca Rochberg has edited and produced translations of all of the extant texts that have become known as "horoscopes." These texts describe the positions and appearances of the various heavenly bodies at the moment of a child's birth. Sometimes a prognostication for the child, based upon the well-established tradition of nativity omens, is also reported in a text. In addition 10 the horoscopes, Rochberg has edited the small number of "birth notes"--texts giving the date and time of birth from which an individual's horoscope could be computed--that have been identified. In total, this makes thirty-two texts. This is only a small, but nonetheless important, subset of the fifteen hundred or so astronomical tablets known from the Late Babylonian period. In its entirety this collection includes the day-to-day observational record of the astronomers, the astronomical diaries; texts used in making predictions of future astronomical events, such as the goal-year texts, the almanacs, and the normal star almanacs; and the texts of mathematical astronomy. However, the horoscopes are unique among the various groups of texts in containing both astronomical data and astrological interpretations. As Rochberg writes, "this distinction between textual genres was made by the scribes themselves, who rarely combined upon a single tablet purely astronomical procedures with omens. This is not to say that the texts which made prognostications, the 'astrological' texts, constituted a separate science. Celestial divination, astronomical observation, and astronomical computation represent interdependent parts of a multifaceted and complex tradition of science in ancient Mesopotamia" (p. x).

Rochberg begins her book by outlining the nature of the Babylonian horoscopes, stressing the many differences between the Babylonian texts and their Greek and Roman counterparts. The texts generally record the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets (following the order Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, and Mars) on or around the date of the child's birth, together with details of lunar and solar eclipses and the length of the lunar month...