Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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In an age where light pollution was minimal, he sees countless stars high above him. His name is Balasi and he is an astronomer, serving in the court of the famous Assyrian king, Esaradan. Amongst the twinkling stars, he can also see his favourite celestial object, a light that shines incredibly bright in the night sky.
This was Dilibat, the Sumerian name for Venus, the shining planet strongly associated with the goddess Ishtar. Balasi was in awe of Venus and the rest of this great divine world above, but he was also annoyed. Only recently, another scholar had mistakenly identified Venus as Mercury.
How this scholar could have made such an error was beyond ballast. The planets looked completely different to the naked eye. Whereas Venus was the brightest object in the sky after the moon, Mercury was a miniscule dot almost impossible to find if you didn't know where to look. Worst of all, this astronomer had then proceeded to misinterpret this celestial omen from the gods and sent the wrong prediction to the king.
The moron. Such an error had to be punished and corrected. And so, Balassi had written to the king. Imprinting his message on a clay tablet, it was the ancient Mesopotamian equivalent of a brutal peer review. He slated his colleague for not knowing the cycles or revolutions of Venus. He labelled him an ignoramus.
Unfortunately for this unnamed Assyrian astronomer, the tablet has survived and will forever be his legacy. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring the fascinating story of astronomy in ancient Mesopotamia and how this scientific field evolved over more than a thousand years.
Early on, astronomy was linked primarily to omens. Comets, eclipses, stars and planets were interpreted as signs left in the night sky by the gods to be deciphered by skilled astronomers who would then predict what this meant would happen on Earth. But over time, these observations were no longer just used to predict events on Earth, but also to predict future astronomical phenomena.
when the next eclipse would take place, the movements of the planets and so on. A much more mathematical form of astronomy. To explain all of this much better than I ever could, I was delighted to interview Dr. Moody Al Rashid, an Assyriologist and Assistant Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. Moody is an expert on ancient Mesopotamian medicine, technology, science and astronomy and is a fantastic speaker.
From omen handbooks to the origins of the zodiac in Babylonia, it was a privilege to delve into the world of Mesopotamian astronomy with Moody, and I hope you enjoy.
Moody, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. And to talk about, well, astronomy in particular, but it feels like it falls into ancient Mesopotamian science, which encompasses so many different fascinating fields. And I'm presuming astronomy is a large part of that.
Absolutely, yes. As you said, there are so many different fields of science in ancient Mesopotamia that includes things like medicine as well as astronomy and then later mathematical astronomy. It's a huge field and I'm so excited to get to talk to you about some of it today. Are they all interlinked in a way? Can sometimes medicine be interlinked with astronomy? You mentioned how mathematics is linked with astronomy there. Do we see the blurring of the lines in many cases?
Yes, absolutely. And I think that's kind of from a, if you think of it from a more general approach to knowledge, knowledge production, natural phenomena in general, that there really is a lot of overlap and a lot of common denominators in how they try to make sense of the world. And one of those common denominators is that they phrased a lot of their observations about the world as omens.
And that is across a lot of different disciplines, but in particular medicine and astronomy in the very early period. So instead of just having a text that says the moon's cycle is 28 days and this is the layout of the land, they're phrased as observations about the moon, how visible it is, whether there's an eclipse paired with a prediction of something to happen on Earth and similar with medical symptoms as well, although those tend to be more related to the body.
But that's also important to highlight straight away, isn't it, Moody, with Mesopotamian history covering thousands of years. With the story of astronomy, I'm guessing you also see what's so interesting, and with these other fields of science too, is an evolution in thinking over those hundreds and thousands of years. Absolutely. There is a lot of change, and in particular in the first millennium BCE. So from
900 BCE to about 100 CE, there's a lot of innovation that happens in how people approach the world and how they write about it as well. Not trying to be as complete, for example, as they were in the previous millennium and trying to use different ways of understanding the world to connect different elements of it. So it's really interesting innovation. Well, let's start at the beginning. Does astronomy, the field of astronomy, does it begin in Mesopotamia?
I would say written astronomy begins in ancient Mesopotamia. For all we know, people were doing really advanced mathematical astronomy before writing. But from what we know from the sources, I would say the earliest texts in astronomy come from ancient Mesopotamia. And some of the observations they make about the planets, the moon, lunar cycles, eclipse cycles, happen really, really early. There is a text from the dawn of writing. I
from around 3000 BCE in which someone is recording transactions related to a festival for the goddess Inanna. The goddess Inanna was the goddess of fertility and later Ishtar, fertility and war, and she's associated with the planet Venus. And so they refer to the planets often by the name of the deity that's associated with it, and there's a reference in this text
to the morning and evening Inanna. And that's an indication that they were making so many observations of the planet Venus that they knew that when it was visible in the morning, it was Venus, and that when it was visible in the evening, it was also Venus, and that these weren't two different stars being observed.
They really had this observational program in place from very early on, even if it doesn't really get fleshed out properly until about 1800 BCE onward, and then really, really drilled down in the first millennium BCE. That's amazing that you have that text, though, surviving from like 5,000 years ago, mentioning Venus.
But do we know then roughly for an origins point of written astronomy in Mesopotamia, of whereabouts in Mesopotamia, and which people are making these earliest observations? Yes. So this text comes from Uruk, I believe. I hope I'm not misremembering. So we're talking about what is now southern Iraq or Mesopotamia.
if you're referring to how the region is referred to in antiquity, southern Mesopotamia, which basically refers to the land between the rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. So it is a place that was home to many civilizations and cultures in antiquity. And for this text, it would have been
most likely the Sumerian speakers who were writing this down. But then later astronomy, we started to move into other civilizations like the Assyrians and Babylonians, Assyrians in the north and Babylonians in the south, barring some periods in which the Assyrians just took over everything.
Once again, I apologise because it's quite an overarching question, because I know the term Mesopotamian, it can be differed into all those different cultures within, like, as you said, the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and so on. But is there a regular theme in how they understood their world, especially when they're looking at the celestial world above them?
Yeah, that's a great question. And thankfully, the answer is yes, because it's so many thousands of years of history and so many sort of changes of the guard, so to speak, that it really is hard to keep track of all the political upheaval. But in terms of scholarship, one thing that all of these cultures and civilizations shared was the use of the cuneiform writing system.
In English, it gets its name from kineus, which means wedge in Latin. You have these clay tablets in which people have impressed signs with a reed stylus that have these really characteristic wedge or triangular shape to them because of how they get impressed with the reed stylus.
And so that is shared across 3,000 years of history. So over half of human written history is in cuneiform in a sense. And out of that writing system, because there are so many unique features to it, there is a really specific way of doing scholarship.
that develops. And that seems to be shared across from the second millennium BCE onwards. So from the dawn of the Babylonians and Assyrians, that seems to start to be shared across those two major players in the region until the end of cuneiform's use. So it sort of survives the
into the Persian takeover, the Greek takeover. The scholarship gets narrower and narrower as new developments happen, but there is that shared medium of cuneiform, which really shapes, I think, shapes how people saw the world because the writing system itself is so complex.
And so how does that information let people like yourselves understand more, let's say, about this earlier stage in written astronomy with what they thought about the stars and what they saw above and how it related to this idea of omens and messages from the gods almost, I guess? One possible way to understand it is that because cuneiform was such an old writing system,
It develops, of course, across time. It was initially developed to write the Sumerian language, which is not related to any known language. And then scribes and scholars expanded what signs stood for to make it possible to use the writing system to write the completely unrelated Akkadian language. So as a result of this expansion and this extension of the writing system to write totally different languages,
Each cuneiform sign takes on more than one meaning. So as a really basic example, the cuneiform sign for house is just a word. It's a sign that stands for a whole word. Not only does it stand for the word house, but it also stands for syllables that sound like the word for house. So in Sumerian, that's e. In Akkadian, that's bit. And so then it sounds like bet and pit and pet. So it takes on all these other values.
and it's slightly technical and boring, but the reason I'm giving this backdrop is to say that in a way, the world starts to look like a cuneiform tablet. So scholarship interprets natural phenomena as signs, almost as cuneiform signs with multiple meanings. And so the kind of aim of scholarship becomes the interpretation of the world as signs. And I think it's really informed by the writing system itself. And that's where omens come in. And
They wrote thousands and thousands of these omens down. And an omen is basically a statement in the cuneiform sources that is something like, if observation, then prediction. So if a lunar eclipse takes place in the east, then the king will die or something along those lines. So the observation is about something going on in the sky.
And they had these omens for all sorts of things, like stuff that happened on Earth, a fox being present in a city, somebody having a birthmark. I have a birthmark on my left cheek. What that might mean about a person's life or the success of the observer. But in terms of celestial omens, they were typically concerned with broader political trends. So you have an observation paired with a prediction. And that observation is understood to be a sign from the gods, not
a cause. The eclipse is not causing anything to happen. It's the gods saying, "Listen, we're sending this eclipse to warn you that the king is going to die. So if you want to do anything about that, here's a set of rituals that's available to you to prevent that from happening." And this whole kind of scholarly culture builds up around these assumptions about what the world means and what messages it's sending.
And so do we have quite a detailed surviving record then about how these early astronomers, if they saw an event in the sky, you mentioned there an eclipse or something similar, do we know much about how they then went on in this early period, then interpreting them as omens? In a way, yes. We have these lists of omens from the earlier periods. So again, when I say earlier period, now we're talking about around 1800, 1900 BCE.
Lists of omens, some of which are impossible things. So an eclipse being green, for example. And the reason for that is that the scholars writing these things down were not just interested in what was, in actual facts and observable things.
They were interested in every possible eventuality that could happen and the outcomes associated with those. So they created this whole system of knowledge built on possibility, effectively. But they structured these in really systematic ways. So for example, in writing down the omens about a lunar eclipse, let's say color, let's use color as an example.
You know, we know that there's only a certain number of colors that an eclipse can look like, and that's mainly red or no color, maybe orange sometimes. But they would apply a couple of other colors to these that were impossible. And they use these kind of ordered ways of expanding upon something they did observe. So they're not making up phenomena. They're just modifying existing possible phenomena in these ways to generate all possibilities.
possible outcomes in order to allow their omens to cover more ground, essentially. And these omens would have been used by decision makers like kings who needed to know whether it was safe to go to war at a particular time of year or whether they should undertake a journey or if there was an eclipse and it foretold the death of the king, then the king had to go into hiding for a
and pretend to be the king while the bad omen passed. And just to be absolutely sure that the king would be safe, they would then kill that person at the end of the few-month period. And this person would sort of sign up and this wasn't a force. Okay, still, that's not a good deal. Yeah, it's a pretty terrible...
I mean, I think some people have argued that actually maybe for some people, you know, living like a king for three months might be the ultimate kind of, but I don't know that I would ever feel that way. True, maybe. So yeah, so they really took these omens seriously, and they generated them in really, really systematic ways. It wasn't just a completely random collection of fake observations. They were grounded in empiricism, but then they were extrapolated in really, really specific ways. Yeah.
Right, because I was then going to ask, you know, we've seen these signs in the sky, or as you say, what they think is signs in the sky, but you know, just the natural phenomena. There is a basis of science behind it, and then into creating these omens and saying what someone should do or what someone shouldn't do. Exactly. They're sort of internally kind of consistent with each other, and the methods they use are agreed upon. And there's like a rule following that these scholars used in generating and writing these down, which is really interesting. But what
gets us more science-y in a way, or science in the way that we might understand it today, which is not necessarily the pinnacle of how we might understand science in the ancient world. But it's
is the way that the omens were applied involved a lot of empirical observation. So moving into the first millennium BCE with the rise of Assyria, which was the largest empire the world had ever known up to that point, covering from Persia or Iran in the east all the way to what is now Cyprus –
and then in the south, Egypt, all the way up north through Anatolia. It was a humongous empire run at its height by someone called King Ashurbanipal, who's an interesting figure in his own right. But even the kings that came before him and Ashurbanipal himself, they relied on their court astronomers to take nightly observations of the sky and then interpret those with respect to these kind of textbooks of omens and
and then make predictions about what the king should or shouldn't do, or whether he should lay low, or everything was fine. But as a result of making all these observations every night, they then started to be able to predict other astronomical phenomena. So there are these little leaps along the way. There's an astronomer called Rashil, who I think he's working under Isarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. I hope that's right, but he's working sometime in the 8th or 7th centuries BCE. And
He starts to make predictions about, listen, there's going to be an eclipse on the 14th. So you're fine until then, but we'll figure it out when that happens. Or Mars will pass through Scorpio.
When that happens, you should be okay. But until then, I would lay low because it's not a good omen for Mars to be in Scorpio, that sort of thing. So you start to see predictions about other astronomical events, which is kind of impossible not to happen at some point if you're making so many observations every single night of the skies and the patterns of planetary motion and of eclipse appearances. LSG
Oh Moody, that's a good taster for where we're going when you mentioned the word Scorpio there. We won't get there quite yet, but that's very exciting for the ultimate destination of our chat. I'd like to ask a bit about these early astronomers a little bit more. When they're making these observations in the night sky, do they have any equivalent of a telescope or can they identify stars and planets just with the naked eye?
That's a great question, because I think, first of all, it forces us to imagine what the sky would have looked like without light pollution, which must have been unbelievable. You know, I grew up in Saudi Arabia, and when I was a kid, we used to go out to the desert on the weekends, and sometimes we'd sleep in the desert.
And I remember looking up at the night sky and being able to see the Milky Way and just probably a couple thousand stars. I mean, it's impossible to count them. Just out of this world, levels of beauty and perspective that you can get from something like that. Whereas here in Oxford, I look up and it's like eight stars, maybe. Like if I'm lucky. Try it louder, Rudy, okay? I think it's even worse, but okay. Okay, but I guess better than like three stars. If we can put ourselves in their shoes and imagine just how much they're looking at.
But amongst those many thousands of anchors that move in a fixed pattern, if they do move very slowly, there are other objects that move quite quickly across the night sky from night to night. And those are the planets. And five of those are visible to the naked eye without use of a telescope, which are the ones that are closest to us. So Mercury, Venus.
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Venus in particular is so bright, if you ever have a chance outside of London to stargaze, Venus, it's impossible to miss that planet. So they noticed from early on, these planets move, whereas the stars are a fixed backdrop. And there are some references to them using various metaphors, and I think one of them is that they're referred to as the
wild sheep of the sky, whereas the stars are the domesticated sheep that don't move. So they have lots of lovely ways of referring to the differences. So they didn't have tools the way we would understand tools. They didn't have telescopes. They didn't have big buildings that helped them organize the sky. They used the naked eye. They used their fingers to measure distances as well as other kind of more standardized measurements.
Then eventually, math was their most important tool for figuring out what was going on in the sky. It's amazing how, for someone who knows nothing about astronomy and needs to get out more of London and go somewhere very remote like the Scottish Highlands to actually have a look and do some stargazing, I guess how easy it is once an astronomer gets their eye in to understand what's a star and what's a planet and understand the differences.
Did they name those planets as well? You've said already Venus and Mars, but do we know what they named those planets? Yes, and they refer to them so many times in the sources that it's sort of hard to doubt our understanding of their naming. But for example, one of the words they used to refer to Venus was dilbat or dilibat, which comes from basically the word for shining.
because it's just such a bright object. Makes sense, yeah. Yeah. And then similarly, the one for Jupiter, which is also bright, sometimes easy to confuse Jupiter and Venus if it's not a good viewing conditions, is Kakabupetsu, which means white star, because it looked, again, like a really bright white star. Saturn, I think, is called Kayamanu, which means it has to do with steadiness, I think, because Saturn moves a bit more slowly because it's further away.
And then there are also deities associated with the planets, just like in Greek. I mean, our names of the planets today are based on the names of deities, Jupiter being the kind of head of the Roman pantheon, for example. And interestingly, the planet Jupiter in Mesopotamia in Babylonian Assyria was associated with the god Marduk, who was the head of the Babylonian pantheon as well. So that pantheon's Jupiter or Zeus, so to speak.
Venus associated with Ishtar, who was Inanna in the earlier periods, but the goddess of love and war, Ishtar. Mars with the god of war, Nergal. So there are some really interesting kind of overlap in how the deities associate with the planets. And sometimes the planets are referred to by their kind of divine name, by the name of the deity associated with them. The...
So astronomers themselves, the people who were gathering that information for kings, as you mentioned there, Moody, do we know much about themselves, about who those people were? Were they considered quite special, almost kind of communicating what the gods had supposedly written in the sky?
I think yes and no. They were privy to this sort of secret knowledge of understanding the universe. So there were rules about transmitting a lot of the textbooks and other types of texts that they used in learning particular discipline, as well as in kind of referring to things for taking their nightly observations.
A lot of these texts exhort secrecy, so you must not share this with the uninitiated, for example. And there's a bit of gatekeeping there. So in that sense, there's a kind of prestige to it and a guardedness to this type of knowledge that requires quite a lot of training to be able to do it correctly, which makes perfect sense. It's not straightforward to
observe planetary motion and predict it and memorize a lot of these omens associated with those and know how to communicate with the king as well. But there's also evidence that some of them weren't treated particularly well. So, for example, there are some letters in which astronomers are writing to the king saying, like, why am I doing this manual labor, which I'm supposed to do instead of paying tax?
It means I can't teach the next generation of astronomers. Like I'm so busy doing all this stuff that I don't have time to do my thing, my astronomy stuff. You know, there are other letters from court scholars. There's one named Urad Gula. He's a physician. So it's a slightly off topic in which whatever he did, he fell out of favor with the king and,
And he and his father write multiple letters begging that he be reinstated because he can no longer afford to live and he's not being paid the way his father had been paid. In one of them, he writes that he's dying of a broken heart. So you can kind of feel the precariousness of it. Yes, what they're doing is uber important to royal decision-making and takes many years of training to achieve, but
It doesn't always match up to the way they get treated in the texts. Sometimes they feel disrespected. That's so interesting. And also the fact that in some of the texts that you have, Moody, it's not just, as you say, the reports, almost kind of there's no kind of personal messaging in them. You have letters from astronomers themselves, from these court people themselves. So you can actually get a sense, almost like the Vindolanda tablets on the Roman frontier and Hadrian's Wall. You get the actual voice of this figure who was living thousands of years ago.
Absolutely. And you also get a sense of it wasn't always sunshine and roses between the astronomers themselves. So there's an interesting letter from an astronomer named Balasi in which he's responding to a concern of the king. So the king wrote these letters to the scholars saying, so-and-so said that Mars is visible, like what's your take on it effectively or that sort of thing.
And there's one in which the king has obviously written and said, Venus is apparently visible, and that's a problem. So can you just talk me through what's happened? We don't have the original letter, but we have Balasi's response, which is basically something along the lines of, the guy who told you that Venus is visible is an idiot.
is actually Mercury. I think he calls him an ignoramus. He's actually Mercury. And actually, you know, it's quite difficult to confuse Mercury and Venus, especially with no light pollution. I find that difficult to wrap my head around. So there's also a little bit of a really kind of nasty peer review system sometimes that comes through in these letters reminding us that these aren't just tablets floating around full of knowledge, but there are people that are writing these and people that are stressing over these and
And even kings who stress over some of the things that they're either observing or experiencing, the letters include letters back and forth to physicians as well. And there are some really lovely kind of human moments where, again, we don't have the letter from the king, but the physician is quoting the king's worry about their baby having a fever and saying, don't worry, it's teething, your baby's teething.
he's going to be totally fine. I know it's stressful, but he'll be fine in four days or whatever the exact prognosis ended up being. So there's a lot of humanity as well as really interesting science in these letters.
A letter like the one with the baby or the one, as you say, where you have one astronomer slating off another for misidentifying those two planets. It was almost as valuable, if not more, than the tablet we'll get to later, which says Alexander the Great died on that day, you know, for completely different reasons. But they're so interesting and often you don't get those surviving in the archaeological record.
I'd like to ask one more question surrounding omens before we move on to that next stage that you hinted at earlier in this kind of development of astronomy, which is also, you mentioned the word earlier when talking about the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal and his astronomer aides having these omen handbooks. Can you tell us a bit about these handbooks that they developed? Yeah.
Yeah, that's another really interesting kind of feature. Or textbook, sorry. Yeah, I know. Well, we call them handbooks, actually. But I use the word textbook because sometimes I think that tells us a little bit more about what they were to these people. In scholarship in ancient Mesopotamia, there are kind of multiple strands. And one of those is the standardization of collections of omens. So in the medical tradition, there's a standardized collection of diagnostic omens, which are organized from head to toe. It's 40 tablets.
It's copied in the same order over and over again once it achieves that standard form for centuries, with some differences, but the kind of order of tablets stays the same, even if there are some variations of the odd omen or sign used.
Similarly, in astronomy, there was a kind of standardized collection of astronomical omens. The title we give to that work, which is about 70 tablets long, I think, and it's 6,500 to 7,000 omens recorded in those tablets. Wow.
We call it Enuma, Anu, and Lil, which means Wen, Anu, and Enlil, which are two of the major deities. Anu is the sky god, Enlil is the Sumerian name for the king of the gods, and this also refers to two of the three main sections of the sky. The sky is divided into the region of Anu.
the region of Enlil and the region of Ea, who I haven't referred to yet, who's a god of wisdom. So that textbook of omens, it's organized. I mean, the first bit's on lunar omens, and then it talks about solar omens, and then weather omens, and then planetary omens. So it's organized. It's not just like a completely random collection of observations and predictions or fake observations and predictions.
There's also the tablet in there that gives tables, like lunar tables of the duration of the visibility of the moon or the number of hours of sunlight and daylight on the equinoxes and solstices, that sort of thing. So it gives these kind of ideal mathematical tables halfway through, which we think were used before.
to allow for anomalies against those mathematical ideals to be considered as omens. So it's a really packed, it's a really dense textbook of omens. And that, we think, comes from the first millennium BCE. There are some forerunners that are earlier, like the lunar omens from the Old Babylonian period.
from around 2000 BCE, but it achieves this kind of standard form that's not exactly standardized all across the board, but is more or less standard in the first millennium BCE. But scribes have other kind of sources at their fingertips as well that are very similar to that textbook and that are in some ways based on parts of it.
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I know we haven't really mentioned the name Babylon too much in our chat so far, but I know in your book you mentioned people called the Kassites. And are they strongly linked in the kind of the creation of writing all this down or the creation of this handbook with the omens at this time? I want to kind of bring Babylon into the conversation here. And I guess maybe this is a way we can do it.
Yeah, definitely. And Babylon also becomes a major kind of player at the very end of cuneiform culture and the kind of height of mathematical astronomy and stuff. So we can hopefully talk about it again a bit later. But yeah, so the Kassites, they're around from about 1500 BCE to 1100 to 1000 BCE. I think the Amarna letters that we were talking about, they come from the Kassite period. But one of the interesting things that the Kassite scholars did, we think, is that they collected
all these threads of knowledge in various disciplines, so primarily astronomy and medicine and a couple of others. And they created these standard textbooks
So there are lots of reasons to attribute this kind of flourishing of scholarship to this period. And literature as well. I always forget about literature. I feel bad saying that. They just standardize a whole host of different works. And then it's in this form that a lot of these textbooks get copied. Previously, it was thought that
Enuma Anu Enlil, the astronomical omen compendium I just referred to, was written in this period, but now I think they've moved the date a little bit further based on other evidence. But the Kassite period is really a kind of anchor for a lot of the production of these texts.
Understood. One more quick tangent before we move on in time. You've seen with the interpretations, do they have quite a lot of meaning behind left versus right in these two? In order to expand upon the omens, so let's say you start with something like Venus wearing a crown. Venus, the planet, sometimes looks like it's surrounded by a bit of a halo. They might expand on that by giving the crown a different color, red, green, white, black, etc. They might expand on it by saying it's
really bright or really dim. So opposites, binary opposites. And they might say it's dimmed on the left side or it's dimmed on the right side. So they definitely use a lot of left-right symbolism, let's say, in generating outcomes for these omens. Because again, it's very unlikely that these are grounded in prediction of something being observed with the moon and an actual political event happening immediately after. Very unlikely that that's the source for there's just far too many of them.
One really nice example from Enuma, Anu, and Lil is a description of Venus being dimmed on the right side having a bad outcome, which is that childbirth will be difficult for women. And the next omen after that is Venus being dimmed on the left side having a good omen, which is that childbirth will be easy. So the kind of reasoning there is that something bad being dim happening to the good side, the right side, has a bad outcome because it's a positive and a negative. So
something bad happening to the good side, it's a bad side, they kind of cancel each other out. So dimmed left side has a good outcome because two negatives become a positive. So there's almost like a mathematical approach to it. But yes, there's definitely this left-right symbolism.
that comes up in really surprising ways in The Omens and really shows how much they thought about how to generate these according to really specific rules. Even if reading them at first glance, you're like, what on earth? This is so bizarre. How are they making these up? But there are actually internal rules to doing it, and right-left is part of that. Which I guess is as to why that handbook seems to be so popular that so many different cultures can pick it up and understand it with these different kings. Yeah.
Moody, let's move on. And you mentioned it earlier as we get to the first millennium BCE, but I hope you don't mind if we refresh that
at this moment in our chat, and if you wouldn't mind explaining it again very quickly, how we get to the next stage. How did the reading of Omens lay the groundwork for more scientific observational astronomy? And I've got a little quote from your book where you say, the leap from interpreting phenomena purely as divine signs to interpreting phenomena purely as astronomical phenomena.
Yeah, it's an incredible moment, I think, in the history of science is when these observations are no longer used or no longer just used to make decisions about stuff on Earth, but when they're used to predict other relationships.
And that really starts to happen, I would say, 8th, 7th century BCE onward and really takes off after that, after the fall of Assyria. And then you start to get different observational astronomy texts coming out of Babylonia, so Babylon and Borsippa and related cities, Uruk as well.
Part of that is that because they were doing so many observations at night, it's impossible not to notice patterns. I mean, we're kind of built to notice patterns, aren't we? And even if those patterns occur over multiple generations, you still have that accumulation of knowledge that is written down that allows people to access and learn from older knowledge in order to make predictions based on the patterns that they can find in these texts.
And from about 600, so that's a little early, but BCE onward, you start to get these diaries. We call them astronomical diaries from Babylonia.
So now we're leaving the Assyrians behind. We're leaving behind Balasi, and we're leaving behind Rashil and all the other astronomers I've already referred to, and poor Ura Gula, the physician who fell out of favor. And we're moving now to, let's just say Babylon, where we have these nightly long observations being written down about everything going on in the sky as well as everything going on on Earth that's deemed to be relevant. So
They give all the positions of the planets. They give whether or not an eclipse is predicted or witnessed, the duration of visibility, what type of moon. Is it a new moon? Is it a full moon? If there is a comet visible, they'll talk about the comet. And then they'll give things like the price of grain prices.
The level of the Euphrates. So there's still this connection between stuff going on above and stuff going on below. It's not worded the way omens are, if X, then Y. It's just a flat-out list of observations. And they do this for centuries. We don't know exactly who's writing these, as far as I know. It may be astronomers. It might be scribes that are being dictated by the astronomers. Or it might be two multiple people coming together
to put these together. And these diaries really lay the groundwork because there are so many observations in them for algorithms to be generated to then predict and model the motion of planets in the sky using mathematics. You can really see in the record, the kind of step one, step two, step three, not that necessarily the mathematical astronomy is a pinnacle of all this, but it is as far as I know, the kind of earliest example of exact sciences in antiquity. And it's a really incredible moment.
And a really generational effort that they've all done kind of together without whether they realized it or not. These are human-generated algorithms that take generations to create. And as you say, you don't know if they're actually doing it deliberately, but hey, presto, you get something absolutely amazing for the end of it, which are these astronomical diaries and what they revealed. Yeah, exactly. Which is just so incredibly, to me, really moving because I think the history of science is a history of people trying to make sense of the world around them
they care enough in these periods to do that every single night. And they care enough to try to connect it with events on Earth, but they also care enough to, they think, oh, wow, this is actually cool. We can make math out of this. I mean, like there were nerds back then, just as they are today. I must admit though, one more thing before we kind of go on to particular discoveries they make, mathematical discoveries they make, and we will get to the word zodiac very soon. But having had a look at some of these astronomical diary entries, what strikes me is like so many of them
they are just so boring. They are so mundane. It's just like there were clouds in the sky today. That was it. It's funny. It's funny. But I guess that's also the magic of them. Yes, I agree. And I think you have, you have these occasional incredible moments in them. Like,
Halley's Comet being observed in the sky. I think it's 164 BCE. And then again, 78 years later. You know, I don't know if you've ever seen a comet. I saw Hale-Bopp when I was a kid and I saw NEOWISE a couple of years ago during the pandemic.
And they're just like these incredible, like, what is this thing just floating in the sky? You know, what is that? And they recognize that we've seen this one before. You know, we saw this, somebody wrote about this 78 years ago. Like maybe they didn't know exactly that, but they knew that this wasn't some bizarre, you know,
that this was an observed phenomenon. And they wrote about it. And I think moments like that are incredibly moving. And then there are the events on Earth, like the one you mentioned earlier, where you have a really boring sentence, the king died. And that king is Alexander the Great. And that's recorded in an astronomical text, essentially. I mean, it's recorded in a lot of other places. But I think it's just incredible that it even finds its way into these observational records. ♪
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Are these observational records also important because
If one of them mentions an eclipse or something, and then you look at other texts that may mention an eclipse. If you go to Alexander the Great, I think they talk about an eclipse before one of his key battles, and it's also mentioned in the diary. Are these diaries also good for pinning down dates in ancient Mesopotamian history for when they occurred? Absolutely. They contain dateable observations. Please don't ask me how those get extrapolated. No, I won't.
Because it's just incredible that we can know exactly. This eclipse lasted for 47 minutes. It's just incredible to me that we know all this stuff. So they do contain dateable and verifiable observations of planetary motion, eclipse cycles, etc. So as it starts to go from less interpretation to more predicting when the next one will happen over these generations of noting down these events that happen in the sky...
Should we talk about some of the key developments? I've got in my notes the goal year method, first of all. Should we talk about that first? Sure, yeah. So there are two kind of offshoots of the diaries and other observations that get made. And there's the mathematical astronomy, which uses pure math to model the movement of planets as well as the Sun and the Moon and eclipses.
But then there are the goal year texts, which use just pattern recognition, essentially, to do the same thing. But they're using recurring patterns that have been observed in the texts to predict when the next such event will occur. And so what they are basically are a list of predictions of astronomical phenomena for the year to come, for the goal year.
They make those predictions, again, in a kind of descriptive way based on existing patterns. And that's really different to the mathematical stuff. But they're happening alongside each other. So even as mathematical astronomy takes off and we have these incredible instructions for how to carry out these procedures...
people are still doing the non-mathematical predictions alongside that. They're doing a whole host of other seemingly less science-y types of astronomy as well alongside that, including using sort of ideal schemes to model the universe that are incorrect, that are just not correct, but that they're still using them maybe to use as a kind of benchmark for observation or a way of predicting things mathematically in a simpler way. We're not really sure. It's a nice example of how they're still doing things the kind of
old way alongside this completely innovative way of doing things. Well, let's go to this completely innovative way of doing things, Moody. Is this where we get the introduction of the famous zodiac? Yes, one of my favorite things to talk about. I've alluded to this kind of ideal way of doing math and sandwiched in that enuma, anu, enlil. There were those lunar tables,
offer us incorrect ways of modeling the universe mathematically, essentially. One of the incorrect but ideal ways that they modeled time was using a schematic calendar, which was actually a very practical way to measure time. So the calendar in Mesopotamia was 12 months of 30 days each. There's also a cultic calendar, which every single month they wait for the new moon and then they announce the start of the next month, etc. But in
In order for things to be possible to do, like paying interest and knowing when things are due, you have to have a fake calendar, basically. And that was 12 months of 30 days each. And that formed part of something that we call schematic astronomy, which all these other kind of slightly incorrect modeling of the universe fall into as well. And there's evidence that then around 500 BCE, just after 500 BCE,
They projected that calendar onto the sky, onto the ecliptic. So the band of the sky where eclipses occur and where the planets are moving and where the sun is moving throughout the year as well. They divided the sky into 12 months.
30 days each, so 12 sections of 30 degrees each, and that becomes the zodiac. And in really early descriptions of the zodiac, those sections of those 12 sections of the sky that are named back then as well after constellations are initially referred to by the names of the months of the calendar. So this is a really interesting kind of theoretical exercise.
that ends up with this spatial expression. And eventually, that becomes the zodiac that we know today. That is the goatfish, so Capricorn, which I only recently learned was actually a goatfish as well in later periods. The goatfish, wow. Yeah, because it's a goat with like a mermaid tail. The scorpions, Scorpius, Leo, Gemini, the twins, etc. So,
They named each of these 12 sections after the main constellation within it. And that is where we get the zodiac from. And the zodiac is this incredible innovation because it allows them to create a new celestial coordinate system to record their observations, but then also to make mathematical calculations within those as well, especially that sort of 30 degrees each. So it's a slightly different system of measurement that is being used in those texts.
So do we know what mathematical equations they then made once they've established the zodiac? What are the key examples of this new mathematical astronomy that you see in places like Babylon in the latter half of the first millennium BC? The mathematical astronomy texts we typically divide into two categories. The first category is these tables that give the kind of values that would be generated with an equation of some kind or an algorithm of some kind.
And then the second category is procedure texts that give instructions for those calculations, which I think is just absolutely incredible. If you read these texts, you have to read them about 200 times. And even at the end of those, you're like, I actually still have no clue what's going on. But the procedure texts...
are basically verbal descriptions of an algorithm. They're giving you instructions, you know, this is the maximum, this is the minimum, you add X to that, if it falls above, then you subtract this much, and then you eventually get this kind of zigzag within a maximum and minimum, and that's supposed to lead you to whatever the distances that has been traveled or whatever is trying to be modeled. So there's a wonderful...
example as well of a procedure text for Jupiter, for the planet Jupiter, that is giving instructions for calculating the distance traveled by Jupiter over 60 days. And it basically models this, and this is all described with words and, of course, numbers, but it's not a flat-out equation like you would have in a math textbook today.
of modeling that distance as two trapezoids. But the trapezoids aren't in real space. They're in abstract mathematical space. And then the area of these trapezoids is the distance traveled by Jupiter. So it's a highly geometric, and I think almost like a precursor to calculus method that's being applied to calculate how far Jupiter has traveled. Not actually how far Jupiter, the planet has traveled, but how far in their vision it has traveled.
But still, it's amazing in its own right, I guess, to have those cuneiform texts surviving and to see how differently they're approaching astronomy to earlier texts. I guess that's an, if a tablet has an astronomical, mathematical equation in it, you can determine that this is from a later period than one which is talking about a gnomon. So I guess you can also, you can learn more about the cuneiform tablets themselves from what's being written on them. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, absolutely. But what I think is really interesting is that even alongside the development of mathematical astronomy, the development of the zodiac, which leads to completely new ways of thinking about other stuff too, not just the sky. So medicine was revolutionized by the zodiac because it made it possible to connect
the zodiac to different parts of the body and just understand the body differently. The cultic calendar was changed with reference to the zodiac where the position of planets within the zodiac was then connected with certain dates. And just like we do astrology today, it's just a different way of organizing information that makes it a little bit more bounded and a little bit easier to follow. There's an excellent scholar named Dr. Willis Munro who's written about how knowledge becomes bounded in the late first millennium BCE.
So alongside all that, omens are still important. And the people doing the astronomy are still calling themselves, which means the scribes of Enuma Anu Enla, the scribes of this textbook.
So even in the later periods where maybe it dwindles in importance, there's still that prestige attached to omen-taking or to a connection with that distant past maybe is another way to account for it. So I think this kind of proliferates a new way of thinking, but alongside that, there's still respect for the past.
But I also think it's important, what you also highlighted there, and we touched on it at the start, how it's not as if astronomy is one field, medicine is another field, mathematics not to do with astronomy is another field. They're all interlinked. And that was a great example, as you mentioned there, that medicine interlinked with the zodiac development. Is mathematics generally in ancient Babylon and Mesopotamia? Does that advance
because of these astronomical developments? Do you see mathematics not to do with astronomy also advance that time period too? That's a great question too. I think typically math was used for practical things, to calculate the area of a field and then the yield that that field might have and therefore how much money you might be able to make from it, that sort of thing, or whatever math you needed to do to calculate how many bricks you needed to build something.
But in the later periods, I don't know if that changes outside of astronomy. And I think there are lots of other things going on as well in the later period. So cuneiform culture is starting to get more and more restricted. When the Greeks come in, in particular, you can see a real decrease in the number of people doing cuneiform. Actually, this starts to happen even with the Persians from about 539 BCE. Instead of being attached to the royal court and having all this prestige, they get relegated to temples.
which has become the main sites for Kineoform or scholarship being done in Kineoform in this way that's kind of established by thousands of years of tradition as well as the innovations that go along with it. And then when the Greeks come, that gets even more restricted. And then
after the Parthians even more so. So I think there is much more going on outside of cuneiform that we don't know about during these later periods because they weren't written on clay. I mean, why did they stop using cuneiform? You know, historians are, how are we supposed to know what they were doing?
And there are lots of references to writing boards and scrolls in the cuneiform text as well. So we know there's this whole other corpus that may well include some pretty cool math. But as far as I know, in terms of schools and what people were learning, math was, well,
Well, I guess in astronomy too, it's for practical things. But it sounds like what you also mentioned there, Moody, I mean, as time goes on with the Hellenistic period and after Alexander the Great and the Seleucids, and then you mentioned the Parthians, does that kind of mathematical astronomy centered in places like Babylon, does that, as you've hinted at there with cuneiform being restricted to temples and so on, does that form astronomy? I don't want to use the words die out, but does it kind of fade away?
I think it gets transmitted. So it gets a new life, really. And there are little pockets of evidence for the transmission of Babylonian astronomical knowledge. There's an Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragment from Egypt that
that has, I'm going to get this slightly wrong because it's been a while since I looked at it, but on one side it has the Saros cycle, which is developed in Mesopotamia, written out in Greek, and on the other side it's sort of spelled out in Akkadian. So there's a direct kind of translation of somebody sharing this knowledge in two different languages. And there are a host of other kind of threads like that that show how it goes from Babylonia into Greece and then beyond. And
the zodiac in use today is the same zodiac that comes from Babylonia. The 60-minute hour comes from the units of measurement that they use for time, as well as the degrees system that they use. So the legacy of Babylonian science is very much a
part of how we still do science, even if what their goals or maybe what they were doing with it was slightly different. It was obviously powerful enough of an organizational system to survive into other cultures and beyond, even if cuneiform dies out. I mean, the last datable tablet is from 79 to 80 CE, and it's an almanac. It's an astronomical almanac of predictions and records for a particular year.
I mean, what a record, though. And as you say, the legacy of Babylonian science is very much alive and kicking today. Moody, this has been absolutely brilliant. We've covered a lot of ground, but I do know that naturally you know a lot more about this than I do. So is there anything that you'd like to mention about Mesopotamian astronomy or Babylonian astronomy in particular that you also really want to highlight before we wrap up that we maybe haven't covered as much as we perhaps should have?
I would love to make a sort of overarching point, which is that people back then were interested in trying to make sense of the world just as we are today. And they did it in really systematic ways, according to sets of rules that they followed that maybe don't make that much sense to us or that maybe never wrote those rules down, but we can extrapolate them from the thousands and thousands and thousands of tablets that they've left behind. There's something really meaningful and moving about the fact that
People were just as intelligent. They had just as innovative moments and leaps as we might have today thousands of years ago. And they are looking at the same sky. I mean, not the same sky I see here at Oxford with eight stars, but the incredible, endless universe that they were trying to make sense of. And I think that's really beautiful. Yeah.
Absolutely. Getting into the mindset, almost like the people who didn't know what was lurking right at the bottom of the oceans, you know, the same with the skies above. Moody, this has been absolutely brilliant. Last but certainly not least, you have written a book which talks about astronomy and Mesopotamia, all that we've covered and so much more. This is called? Between Two Rivers, Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History. Brilliant. Well, Moody, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me.
Well, there you go. There was Dr. Moody Al-Rashid introducing you to ancient Mesopotamian astronomy. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you leave us a rating as well, we'd really appreciate that.
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