AN INTRODUCTION TO MESOPOTAMIAN SCHOLARLY DIVINATION

The prognostication of events through signs discerned in all sorts of phenomena of the natural and human social world was practiced throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Before Hellenistic times, when the truth value of divination was first subject to philosophical and logical evaluation, divination was assumed to provide a legitimate means of determining the course of future events. Even after divination came under severe criticism in some Platonist and Stoic circles, various divinatory practices continued. Its widespread nature as well as its antiquity is well defined by Cicero in his work De Divinatione, in which he mentions both the Assyrians and the “Chaldeans” (Babylonians) as especially noted for celestial divination and nativities:

The rich source material for the activities of scribes in the Neo-Assyrian court makes it clear that the scribal personnel of the palace, those involved in celestial and other divinatory sciences, participated in a complex of relationships that were at once political and religious. By the fourth century b.c., however, evidence for the intense involvement of the king with the scholars appears to diminish. To say that cultural and intellectual change is shaped by political and social change is perhaps true, but in the present context, none too clear. At the end of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, the fall of Babylonia in 539 b.c. to Achaemenid King Cyrus II certainly affected Mesopotamian politics and society, but what the nature of these changes may have been for the intellectual elite is difficult to identify. One determinable change in the environment of later Babylonian scholarship was the shift of the locus of astronomical activity from the palace to the temple. When exactly this occurred, however, is not well documented. Only limited Achaemenid evidence is so far available for the association of the scholars with the temple. Although the astronomical diaries testify to the continuous activity of astronomy in Babylon from the eighth century b.c., concrete support for identifying the temple Esagila as the provenance of the diaries comes only in the Arsacid period.

It is hardly more than 100 years since the recovery of Babylonian astronomy, when, as Neugebauer said, “for the first time the words ‘Babylonian astronomy’ became endowed with a concrete meaning, fully comparable to that of ‘Greek astronomy’ enshrined in the Almagest or the Handy Tables.” Since that time, the relatively rapid period of decipherment and exposition of the contents of the Babylonian mathematical astronomy has not been matched by an equally rapid reception of Babylonian materials into the field of the history of science, that is, until relatively recently. By the mid-1960s those historians who continued to find the expression “Babylonian science” problematic and who were reluctant to include the cuneiform astronomical, and certainly the astrological, sources within the history of science were nonspecialists in the ancient Near East, for whom the Mesopotamian texts did not appear to be sufficiently explanatory or theoretical; indeed, their contents were viewed as merely practical or technical, therefore not meeting expectations for “science” then measured by standard western criteria. The fact that the astronomical texts were produced by scribes working within the religious framework of the Late Babylonian temples, and the preponderance of divination and astrology was furthermore seen as symptomatic of a phase before the emergence of science. In some works, the supposed prescientific historical period was found to correspond to a certain cognitive developmental phase as well, termed prelogical or mythopoeic, or the like.

THE EVIDENCE OF TRANSMISSION

Second only to the invention of writing, science, in the forms of astronomy and astrology, ranks as the cultural phenomenon through which Mesopotamian civilization had its broadest impact on other cultures. This impact is measured by the nature of the evidence for the transmission of the Mesopotamian celestial sciences both to the west and east, in antiquity and even later. During the Hellenistic period the transmission of astronomical knowledge from Mesopotamia to Greece was to be influential in the early development of western astronomy. The preservation of Babylonian astronomy in Medieval European, Indian, and Arabic traditions is in turn a consequence of the influence of Hellenistic astronomy and astrology, in which parts of the Babylonian tradition came to be embedded. Whereas the Indian reception of western astronomy and astrology occurred as early as the mid-second century of the Common Era, the impact of Indian astronomy on Arabic astronomy took place during the ninth century of our era, by which time Indian astronomy represented a hybrid of Babylonian and Greek traditions. In addition to the Babylonian contribution to Arabic science via India, the Greek Almagest became another significant vehicle for the transmission of Babylonian astronomy to the Islamic world and all the places where the Almagest became known. Babylonian astronomical units (the sexagesimal system, the measure of time and arc, units of length and magnitude in cubits and fingers, tithis, and ecliptical coordinates), parameters (such as period relations for lunar, solar, planetary phenomena, and values for the length of daylight), and methods (Systems A and B of Babylonian mathematical astronomy and methods for computing the rising times of the zodiac) were incorporated within the astronomy of these later antique and mediaeval sciences.

To the ancient mesopotamian literati of the middle of the first millennium b.c., the patterns of stars covering the sky were a celestial script. The “heavenly writing” (šiṭir šamê or šiṭirti šamāmī) was a poetic metaphor occasionally used in Babylonian royal inscriptions to refer to temples made beautiful “like the stars” (kīma šiṭir šamê, literally, “like the heavenly writing”). In these Babylonian inscriptions, the metaphor is not used explicitly for astrology or celestial divination, but the notion of the stars as a heavenly script implies their capacity to be read and interpreted. Representing the work of the divine, the stars, “written” in the sky as they were conceived to be, could convey a sense of the eternal. When Neo-Assyrian King Sennacherib (704–681 b.c.) claimed of his capital city Nineveh that its “plan was drawn since time immemorial with the heavenly writing,” he meant that, when the gods drew the stars upon the heavens, they also drew up the plans for that city. A seventh-century scholarly text from Aššur explains the starry sky as the “lower heavens” (šamû šaplûti), made of jasper, on whose surface the god Marduk drew “the constellations of the gods” (lumāši ša ilāni). The image of the heavens as a stone surface upon which a god could draw or write, as a scribe would a clay tablet, complements the metaphoric trope of the heavenly writing.

THE IDEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND

In the preceding chapter, parallels found within the contents of horoscopes and a variety of astronomical sources establish links between the modern categories of astronomical and astrological classes of texts in the scribes' repertoire. The horoscopes therefore uncover interrelations among celestial scientific texts and raise the question of the integrated nature of Babylonian celestial science in general. The place of horoscopy in the context of other Late Babylonian astronomical texts is secured by comparison with the content of those astronomical texts, but what of the relationship of horoscopes to other “astrological” genres, particularly celestial omens? An account of the data presented in horoscopes in light of traditional celestial omens has been undertaken in Chapter 3. But the historical question, whence the foundations for Babylonian horoscopy, cannot be answered solely by the identification of textual antecedents, either astronomical or astrological, but must also consider the ideological dimension as well.

We turn our attention then to the relation of the new genethlialogy to earlier celestial omens, from the perspectives of the meaning and authority of celestial signs, and the relation between the individual and the divine cosmos. Always a matter of translation and inference, we are sharply limited by our ability to penetrate to the underlying ideologies of our texts concerning the physical universe, why and how the phenomena constituted “signs,” and the relationship between humankind and the gods.

Celestial divination emerged within a cuneiform scribal tradition devoted to the systematic reckoning of “signs,” taken as messages from the gods as to what lay in store for humanity. The technique of divining the future in this way lay in the methods of scholarship involved in the copying, consulting, and commenting on lists of omens. This was evidently conceived of as categorically different from the direct reception of the gods' message through visions, frenzy, or dream incubation. Since the end of the second millennium b.c., the reading and the interpretation of heavenly signs in some form or another are well attested in Mesopotamia, and the spread of this tradition is already well evidenced in states influenced by the cuneiform literate culture, such as the Hittite Empire, Syria, and Elam, which bordered Mesopotamia. Textual evidence for the history of Babylonian divination from celestial signs, attestation of this activity in Mari letters notwithstanding, can be defined as beginning with late Old Babylonian omen texts and continuing through Middle Babylonian and Middle Assyrian forerunners to the canonical celestial omen series Enūma Anu Enlil to the variety of celestial and nativity omens as well as horoscopes of the Achaemenid, Seleucid, and Arsacid periods. Over the course of this nearly 2,000-year-long history, changes and developments certainly occurred. But despite changes in textual formalities and even specific content and methods, the coherence of Babylonian astrology may be found in the persistent belief that the sky could be read as symbolic for the human realm, as expressed in the metaphor of the heavenly writing.

By the late fifth century b.c., judging by the appearance of horoscopes whose purpose was to determine aspects of an individual's life from celestial signs, the heavens were thought to bear meaning not only for the king and the state as in the traditional body of omen texts, but also for the individual. Not many of the extant horoscope texts contain statements concerning the life of the native, but all are introduced by the date of a birth. The intent is thereby unequivocal. Cuneiform horoscopy of necessity relied on the availability of recorded planetary and lunar data, rather than on observation, because not every planet is necessarily above the horizon at the moment of birth, nor obviously does every birth occur at night. This chapter aims to show the dependence of the Babylonian horoscopes on a variety of predictive and observational astronomical texts. From this it appears that the scribes who drew up horoscopes, although competent in all the aspects and methods of celestial science, or so we must assume, did not compute planetary positions for horoscopes directly, but utilized a wide range of astronomical texts at their disposal as reference material.

The development of the astronomical methods on which horoscopy depended can be traced back centuries before their culminating phase in the mid-first millennium, if one includes the evidence of early work on periodicities in the form of visibility and invisibility periods attested in texts such as mul.apin, Enūma Anu Enlil, or the astrological reports of the Neo-Assyrian period.