The Challenge of the Astronomical Diaries from Babylon: Authors, Concern, Scholarship, and Worldview Reconsidered.

• Author: Van Der Spek, R.J.
• Position: Keeping Watch in Babylon: The Astronomical Diaries in Context

Ancient Babylonia provides us with types of information that have few equivalents in other parts of the ancient world. An outstanding example is the corpus of about one thousand tablets containing the so-called Astronomical Diaries from Babylon, covering a period from the sixth to the first century BCE. Despite the name, the corpus is of interest not only for students of ancient astronomy. Its main concern is indeed the daily notation of celestial phenomena, but increasingly the compilers added other information, such as the level of the Euphrates, weather phenomena (wind, clouds, rain, solar or lunar halo, lightning), the price of important foodstuffs (barley, dates, mustard [dodder], cress, sesame) and wool, ominous events such as monstrous births, plagues, famines, and historical information, especially concerning the king and the temples and city of Babylon. These texts thus give us an insight into the daily concerns and events confronted by the Babylonian citizen. What is the weather, what is the price of food, what is happening in the streets of Babylon, are there celebrities to watch or important letters read aloud in the theater?

The documents show some resemblance with the Annates Maximi in Rome. This was an annual record kept by the Pontifex Maximus and published on white boards mounted on the Regia, the house of the Pontifex on the Forum Romanum. These annals recorded the same kinds of information as the diaries: names of magistrates (necessary for timekeeping, cf. the regnal years of a king or the years of the Seleucid and Parthian eras), political events. plagues, famines, eclipses, omens, prices. The practice of registering these annals existed between ca. 400 and ca. 130 BCE, thus contemporaneously with our diaries, though these continued at least until 22 BCE. Pontifex Publius Mucius Scaevola terminated the custom in Rome. The content of previous annals was later collected in eighty books, often used as a source by Roman historians (Frier 1979). Unfortunately these books are lost, while our diaries partly survive.

Both collections constituted a laconic record of selected information, with no intent to write history as a narrative (cf. Cicero, De Oratore II 12.52; Cato, Origines IV, apud Aulus Gellius, Nodes Atticae II 28.6). There is also a similarity between the purpose of the documents. Both sought to determine the will of the gods. In Babylon "one of the aims seems to have been to facilitate correlations between events in heaven and those on earth" so that they could be used for the science of divination (discussed in the introduction to Keeping Watch in Babylon, p. 7; cf. van der Spek 2008: 284-87). In Rome the annals fit in with the duty of the Pontifex Maximus, the procuratio prodigiorum, the expiation of prodigies, and thus with procuring the pax deorum, the peace with the gods, for which it was necessary to observe prodigies and omens in relation to calamities and successes (Rodriguez-Mayorgas 2011). Interest in seeking the origins of earthquakes and eclipses is hinted at by Aulus Gellius (II 28.3-4).

In Rome this work had a political aspect since the pontifex was a political public figure who published his material; in Mesopotamia the work of the astronomers served astrology in the service of Assyrian and Babylonian kings in order to predict the success or failure of future campaigns and other enterprises of the king (see the chapter by Eleanor Robson-more on this below). Even in Alexander's time there is evidence of "Chaldean" diviners, who warned the king of the implications of observed omens (van der Spek 2003). Their role as advisors of the king probably soon diminished. Nevertheless, the work continued as a scientific enterprise, which was probably not published but remained within scholarly circles. It was, at least in Hellenistic times, the work of astronomers in the service of the temple and drawing income from that institution.

The study of the Astronomical Diaries was made possible by the giant enterprise started by Abraham Sachs, who worked for decades on them, and by Hermann Hunger, who extremely quickly and brilliantly elaborated and (nearly) finished it in seven volumes: Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia (Sachs and Hunger 1988-2014; the final volume is in preparation). The first three volumes are of prime interest for the nonastronomical information and the main subject of the volume under review.

The book under review is a collection of contributions to a conference held at Durham in July 2016, some two decades after the completion of the three volumes by Sachs and Hunger containing the diaries. The historical sections had been published in Italian by Giuseppe Del Monte in 1997. Several authors have quoted and sometimes re-edited numerous passages after collation in various publications (e.g.. Bock 2010 and Shayegan 2011 for the Parthian period only). Here, many passages are quoted and edited anew. Currently a new edition of chronographic texts from Babylon--including...