There are dozens of cuneiform Mesopotamian texts with real observations of eclipses, mainly from Babylonia.
The Babylonian GU text arranges stars in ‘ strings‘ that lie along declination circles and thus measure right-ascensions or time intervals and also employs the stars of the zenith, which are also separated by given right-ascensional differences. The MUL.APIN contains catalogs of stars and constellations as well as schemes for predicting heliacal risings and settings of the planets, and lengths of daylight as measured by a water clock, gnomon, shadows, and intercalations. They are made up of the division of the sky into three sets of thirty degrees and the constellations that inhabit each sector. First presumed to be describing rules to a game, its use was later deciphered to be a unit converter for calculating the movement of celestial bodies and constellations.īabylonian astronomers developed zodiacal signs. It is the earliest evidence that planetary phenomena were recognized as periodic.Īn object labeled the ivory prism was recovered from the ruins of Nineveh.
Tablets dating back to the Old Babylonian period document the application of mathematics to the variation in the length of daylight over a solar year.Ĭenturies of Babylonian observations of celestial phenomena were recorded in the series of cuneiform tablets known as the Enûma Anu Enlil-the oldest significant astronomical text that we possess is Tablet 63 of the Enûma Anu Enlil, the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, which lists the first and last visible risings of Venus over a period of about 21 years. The Babylonians were the first to recognize that astronomical phenomena are periodic and apply mathematics to their predictions. 1830 BC) and before the Neo-Babylonian Empire ( ca. “ Old” Babylonian astronomy was practiced during and after the First Babylonian Dynasty ( ca. The fact that many star names appear in Sumerian suggests a continuity reaching into the Early Bronze Age. Modern knowledge of Sumerian astronomy is indirect, via the earliest Babylonian star catalogs dating from about 1200 BC.
The origins of Western astronomy can be found in Mesopotamia, and all Western efforts in the exact sciences are descendants in a direct line from the work of the late Babylonian astronomers. Nevertheless, the surviving fragments show that Babylonian astronomy was the first “ successful attempt at giving a refined mathematical description of astronomical phenomena” and that “ all subsequent varieties of scientific astronomy, in the Hellenistic world, in India, in Islam, and in the West … depend upon Babylonian astronomy in decisive and fundamental ways.” Only fragments of Babylonian astronomy have survived, consisting largely of contemporary clay tablets containing astronomical diaries, ephemerides, and procedure texts, hence current knowledge of Babylonian planetary theory is in a fragmentary state. Classical Greek and Latin sources frequently use the term Chaldeans for the astronomers of Mesopotamia, who were considered as priest-scribes specializing in astrology and other forms of divination. This approach to astronomy was adopted and further developed in Greek and Hellenistic astrology. This was an important contribution to astronomy and the philosophy of science, and some modern scholars have thus referred to this novel approach as the first scientific revolution. They began studying and recording their belief system and philosophies dealing with an ideal nature of the universe and began employing an internal logic within their predictive planetary systems. The modern practices of dividing a circle into 360 degrees, of 60 minutes each, began with the Sumerians.ĭuring the 8th and 7th centuries BC, Babylonian astronomers developed a new empirical approach to astronomy. This system simplified the calculating and recording of unusually great and small numbers. The earliest catalog, Three Stars Each, mentions stars of the Akkadian Empire, of Amurru, of Elam and others.Ī numbering system based on sixty was used, a sexagesimal system. These constellations may have been collected from various earlier sources. Babylonian astronomy seemed to have focused on a select group of stars and constellations known as Ziqpu stars.