While the legal ownership of the Company’s knowledge resources could be transferred to the Crown with the passage of a new charter, just what it meant to be a “public” knowledge resource was up for debate. In this period, just as natural philosophy was resolving into separate disciplines with separate institutional structures, the cultural space of knowledge production was separating into new and separate spheres: public versus private, national versus imperial, professional versus amateur. The Company’s piecemeal absorption into the British state was not so much the erasure of a historical anomaly but part of the very process by which “states” and “publics” came to be more clearly defined against corporations and “private” interests. This chapter considers how the public–private status of the Company was also debated and constructed in relation to science, education and access to knowledge resources. At a time when a coherent British imperial identity was only just beginning to crystallize, the extremely convoluted property relations for the library-museum (held in trust by the Company for the Crown, which in turn held it in trust for the people of British India) raised awkward questions about the very coherence of the idea of an imperial public.

Chapter 2 discusses chief trends in the history of science that established cultural and pluralist approaches to science and which are essential to integrating the cuneiform scientific textual culture within the history of science proper.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by discussing the intersection of Assyriology and the history of science. This chapter defines the cuneiform scribal-scholarly knowledge termed ṭupšarrūtu in Akkadian as a basis for understanding the scope and character of cuneiform science.

Two strands of intellectual revisionism were essential to the project of this book, which set out to connect our historiography of the cuneiform sciences to an anthropology of science. The first was the rise of pluralism within the history of science, most famously but not exclusively represented by Thomas Kuhn, and the second was a more recent development, the “quiet revolution” within anthropology of the ontological turn.

Chapter 4 brings ideas from philosophy, the philosophy of science, and anthropology concerning the debate over worldviews (conceptual schemes) on the one hand and the plurality of worlds on the other. It takes up conceptual and ontological relativism as it pertains to the history of early sciences and the world(s) to which they referred.

Chapter 3 analyzes the contribution of three prominent historians of science in the mid twentieth century who shaped the modern historiography of the ancient astronomical sciences. Its objective is to expose fundamental philosophical and historiographical underpinnings to the writing of the history of science in antiquity.

Chapter 6 elucidates the concept of “world” in the cuneiform corpus. This chapter is meant as an alternative to the reconstruction of a cosmology in the sense of a systematic account of the physical universe and argues that worldmaking serves better as a heuristic for non-Western premodern systems of knowledge than does the idea of cosmology.