Tagesspiegelbeilage vom 02.07.2022

Das Institut für Wissensgeschichte des Altertums wird neue Aspekte des menschlichen Wissens in der Antike ausleuchten: Das Projekt „Zodiac“ erforscht die Erfindung des Tierkreises durch die Babylonier

Ist es irreführend zu fragen, ob die Einweihung eines neuen Instituts an der Freien Universität unter einem glücklichen Stern stand? Am 17. Juni 2022 geboren, hat das Institut für Wissensgeschichte des Altertums das Sternzeichen Zwilling mit Aszendent Jungfrau. Dass zum Zeitpunkt seiner Eröffnung, um 11 Uhr, die Sonne im 9. Haus und der Merkur im 8. Haus stand, deutet darauf hin, dass das Institut besonders neugierig und darauf ausgerichtet sein könnte, seine Mitmenschen zu verstehen. Jupiter im 6. Haus spricht dafür, dass es hohe Standards im beruflichen Umgang mit anderen beachten und einfordern wird.

Wissenschaft oder Aberglaube?

Nun man kann derlei Vorhersagen und Horoskopie als Aberglauben abtun. Tatsächlich aber gehen all ihre Bestandteile – der Tierkreis (lat. zodiacus, von griechisch zodiakós), die Sternzeichen, die astronomische Berechnung der Planetenpositionen und die astrologische Interpretation des Ganzen – auf eine wissenschaftliche und kulturelle Revolution zurück, die in genau diesem Institut für Wissensgeschichte des Altertums in Zukunft unter anderem erforscht und gedeutet werden soll.

Der Wissenschaftshistoriker Professor Mathieu Ossendrijver wird eben diesen „zodiacal turn“, der sich im antiken Babylonien vor 2500 Jahren, also um 500 vor Christus, vollzogen hat, als Leiter des im neuen Institut angesiedelten Forschungsprojekts „ZODIAC – Ancient Astral Science in Transformation“ während der kommenden fünf Jahre erforschen.

Matthieu Ossendrijver ist nicht nur Althistoriker und Assyriologe, sondern auch Astrophysiker. Das ist insofern von Vorteil, als das ZODIAC-Projekt sich mit der Geburt der babylonischen Astralwissenschaft, also der Horoskopie, beschäftigen will.

Matthieu Ossendrijver nennt mehrere Elemente, die zusammenkommen mussten, damit die Babylonier die Sternzeichen und das Horoskop erfinden konnten: Erstens hatten sie schon über lange Zeit die Bewegungen der Himmelskörper, der Sterne und Planeten, beobachtet, aufgezeichnet und darin Regelmäßigkeiten und Muster erkannt. Zweitens entwickelten die Babylonier über die bloße empirische Beobachtung hinaus mathematische Techniken und Werkzeuge, mit deren Hilfe sie die Bahnen der Planeten und Sterne mathematisch berechnen und vorhersagen konnten. Ossendrijver nennt das den „mathematical turn“, der Teil des „zodiacal turn“ gewesen sei.

Erst dann wird verständlich, welche Bedeutung die Erfindung des Tierkreises vor 2500 Jahren hatte: Die Babylonier teilten nun den Himmel in zwölf Bereiche auf, denen jeweils eine Figur, ein Name und eine bestimmte Bedeutung zugeordnet wurde: den Tierkreis mit seinen zwölf Sternzeichen wie Widder, Zwilling, Jungfrau oder Löwe.

Schließlich verbanden die babylonischen Astralwissenschaftler diese zu einem Wissenskorpus, aufgrund dessen Berechnungen, zu welchem Zeitpunkt welche Planeten wo im Tierkreis standen, Bedeutungen und Bedeutungszusammenhänge formuliert werden konnten.

Doch was ist eigentlich der Tierkreis, den die Babylonier erfanden und der bis heute in Zeitschriften als Grundlage für Horoskope dient? „Eigentlich handelt es sich dabei um ein Band, einen Himmelsstreifen, der den Bereich ein paar Grad unter und ein paar Grad über der scheinbaren Sonnenbahn und den scheinbaren Mond und Planetenbahnen umfasst“, sagt Matthieu Ossendrijver. „Mit dem freien Auge ist der Tierkreis nicht zu sehen: Vielmehr erfanden die Babylonier eine mathematische Konstruktion, die sie nun in zwölf Teile zu jeweils 30 Grad einteilten, und bei der sie jeden Abschnitt nach dem in ihm markanten Sternbild benannten.“

Erst durch diese Art der berechnenden Astrologie, die etwa die Sonne im 8. und den Saturn im 5. Haus verortet, kann darüber gerätselt werden, was das für ein Kind – oder ein Institut – bedeutet, das an diesem Tag das Licht der Welt erblickt.

Wie hielt sich die Deutung alter babylonischer Zeichen bis heute?

„Für die Babylonier waren die Sterne und die Himmelsphänomene göttliche Zeichen an die Menschen“, erläutert Mathieu Ossendrijver. Die Stellung der Planeten bei der Geburt eines Kindes verrät also etwas über dieses Kind. Und die Astrologie dient dazu, diese göttliche Botschaft zu entziffern und zu verstehen.

Warum aber war – und ist – die Horoskopie dermaßen erfolgreich? Wie konnte sich die babylonische Astralwissenschaft zuerst über die antike Welt ins Römische Reich, dann ins Judentum, in den Islam und ins Christentum hinein weiterverbreiten? Und sich so hartnäckig halten, dass heute noch Menschen zu Jahresbeginn ihr Horoskop studieren, um zu erfahren, ob zum Beispiel das Glück in der Liebe winkt oder ein Rückschlag im Beruf droht?

Für deren Attraktivität spricht dem Wissenschaftler zufolge, dass die Horoskopie einerseits das menschliche Bedürfnis anspricht, etwas über die eigene Zukunft zu erfahren.

Andererseits überzeugt das abstrakte System aus Zahlen und Sternbildern: Es lässt sich unabhängig von einer bestimmten Sprache, Geschichte oder Schrift sehr leicht übersetzen. Man stehe noch am Anfang, sagt Mathieu Ossendrijver, das Institut für Wissensgeschichte – unter der Leitung von J. Cale Johnson, Professor für Wissensgeschichte – ist schließlich gerade erst eröffnet worden. Aber man verrät wohl nicht zu viel, wenn man sagt: Die Antwort steht auch in den Sternen.

The first volume of „A Cultural History of Chemistry in Antiquity“ has been published in Open Access. It is a multi-author monograph by Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli and Sydney H. Aufrère, edited by Marco Beretta.    

A Cultural History of Chemistry in Antiquity covers the period from 3000 BCE to 600 CE, ranging across the civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East. Over this long period, chemical artisans, recipes, and ideas were exchanged between Mesopotamia, Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. The flowering of alchemy in the Middle and Early Modern Ages had its roots in the chemical arts of antiquity. This study presents the first synthesis of this epoch, examining the centrality of intense exchange and interconnectivity to the discovery and development of sources, techniques, materials, and instruments.

The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Chemistry presents the first comprehensive history from the Bronze Age to today, covering all forms and aspects of chemistry and its ever-changing social context. The themes covered in each volume are theory and concepts; practice and experiment; laboratories and technology; culture and science; society and environment; trade and industry; learning and institutions; art and representation.

Table of Contents

Volume 1: A Cultural History of Chemistry in Antiquity
Edited by Marco Beretta, University of Bologna, Italy
Series Preface
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction, Marco Beretta
1.Theory and Concepts: The Mythological Foundation of Chemical Theories in Ancient Civilizations, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta
2.Practice and Experiment: The Conquest of Matter, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta
3.Laboratories and Technology: From Temples to Workshops: Sites of Chemistry in Ancient Civilizations, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta
4.Culture and Science: Gods, Myths and Religions, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta
5.Society and Environment: The Alteration of the Ancient Landscape, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta
6.Trade and Industry: The Circulation of Trade in the Mediterranean, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta
7.Learning and Institutions: The Invention of Chemical Recipes, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta
8.Art and Representation: The Iconographic Imprinting of Ancient Chemical Arts, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Mark Geller, Jewish Chronicle Professor of Jewish Studies,
University College London, March 28, 2022

British Museum Department of Middle East Newsletter

The great Assyriological medical project that we have entitled NinMed has been running within the Department of the Middle East of the British Museum since 2020. Such international collaboration is not set up overnight, and here we sketch its origins and early development. The story began at Berlin with the Grossmeister of ancient Babylonian medicine, Franz Köcher. Herr Köcher was Professor for the History of Medicine at the Freie Universität Berlin, but he had almost no students and no colleagues who dared work with him, because of his intimidating reputation. He, it was generally accepted, knew everything there was to know about Babylonian medicine, for he had devoted his entire life to it (after five years as a tank commander in the Second World War). His office in his Berlin apartment in the Windscheidstrasse was effectively a university study room, complete with floor-to-ceiling card files recording every single word on every single Akkadian medical tablet. He also had stacks of transliterations and word-studies of Babylonian medicine, none of which came to be published. The Professor was too busy making hand copies (in six impressive tomes) of all cuneiform medical tablets from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the British Museum, the two largest and most important collections in the world. And there was one more side to him which everyone then knew of but never talked about: in the last days before the Berlin Wall was constructed, Herr Köcher packed his suitcases with all his research papers on Mesopotamian medicine and crossed over from East to West Berlin. He never returned, even after the Wall came down.

Tere were two younger colleagues from London with whom he had regular contact, which was very exceptional. One was Irving Finkel, and the other was Mark Geller from UCL. Neither would ever consider visiting Berlin without visiting Herr Köcher and his wife in the Windscheidstrasse. Finkel had a particularly close and productive relationship with Herr Köcher over many years, since he regularly sent him transliterations of unpublished Babylonian medical tablets from the British Museum. Geller did the same, but Herr Köcher used to hint that Finkel’s transliterations were more accurate. The only student who was actually brave enough to study with Herr Köcher came to London in 1984, to the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale organised by Christopher Walker, then of the British Museum. She faithfully reported that Köcher had told her before departing, ‘regards to Finkel and Geller, but no one else!’

The problem with this situation was that everyone knew that, in the well-worn phrase, ‘Köcher is working on medicine’, and no one dared rival his dominance of the field. Two things changed the status quo. One was Köcher’s untimely death, aged 85. The second was Geller’s appointment as Guest Professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin, on secondment from UCL, from 2010–2018, under the auspices of a major 10-year research cluster, Topoi, funded by the Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft, which employed some 200 researchers on all aspects of antiquity. Geller’s main programme in Berlin was to carry on Köcher’s research by launching the task of publishing editions and translations of Assyrian and Babylonian medicine, which was greatly facilitated by a five-year grant from the European Research Council for the project known as BabMed.

With an excellent BabMed team assembled, including Strahil Panayotov and later Krisztian Simko, something very unexpected happened. Before he passed away, Franz Köcher had sent to Finkel and Geller an invaluable reconstruction of a group of related tablet fragments from Yale, which turned out to be a unique catalogue of approximately 90 medical treatises from about 700 BC, from the city of Ashur. One additional fragment of the work from the Oriental Institute in Chicago had previously been copied by Finkel in the 1970s. This carefully structured catalogue with composition titles and line totals revealed that Mesopotamia possessed a highly systematic and extensive corpus of medicine more than two centuries before Hippocrates, often considered to be the father of modern medicine. The BabMed team began working on this catalogue, and eventually Strahil Panayotov realised that there was a parallel relationship between the Ashur catalogue of all the titles and the existing Assyrian medical tablets in Ashurbanipal’s Royal Library in Nineveh. Instead of being a large but random collection, as it had seemed, the Nineveh medical tablets could now be shown to constitute a medical encyclopaedia, organised into the same 12 major genres of medical literature set out in the Ashur medical catalogue. This discovery meant that, after the Berlin BabMed project concluded, the crucial next task was to reconstruct the medical library of Nineveh against the background of the ancient catalogue.

The problem was to find funding to assemble a new research team with sufficient knowledge and experience of working with Akkadian medical texts. Even experienced Assyriologists experience difficulty in reading cuneiform medical texts, due to the technical nature of the language and writing style. Fortunately, the years of work on medicine in Berlin provided the expertise which was needed, in Panayotov and Simko. The obvious choice for funding was to turn to the Wellcome Trust, which announced grant programmes for major research projects in Medical Humanities. The Trust has inspiring grant programmes which are well organised, with Wellcome staff even offering useful advice to applicants on how to create a successful application. The advisors warned, however, that final decisions on grant applications were made by special panels, and these panels changed regularly and were not always interested in all the topics submitted. They also gave sound advice: to make the application for Nineveh medicine more general than a simply textual project, but to show how important the material was for other fields, such as the history of medicine and various aspects of anthropology. The application was sent to two senior researchers at UCL who worked in other fields of medical history and who themselves had won Wellcome awards. Both were enthusiastic about the value of the project, and their further suggestions were incorporated into our submission.

After our initial submission was turned down, and a brief telephone call to Jon Taylor and Irving Finkel, it was decided that a new proposal could be submitted directly from the British Museum to the Wellcome Trust, to make this valuable treasure trove of medical history accessible and available, through digital editions and translations of Nineveh medicine. That proved successful.

During the first six months of the NinMed project, substantial textual material has been gathered, edited, and worked through, with the aim of providing accurate readings and translations of each text. Weekly online meetings of the entire team (the two researchers Panayotov and Simko, plus Taylor, Finkel and Geller) greatly facilitate the results. Two colleagues from Paris, two more from Berlin, and one from Geneva, also join this weekly working group, which reads through each text line-by-line with problematic passages analysed and discussed. The idea is to create translations which are not only meant for specialists but will also be meaningful to medical historians and members of the public, especially doctors who have an interest in ancient or Middle Eastern medicine. The aim is to have all major texts in the Nineveh medical library transliterated and translated by the end of the project.

Postscript: the progress of scholarship after 171 years (1850–2021)

In describing our great new Project on the cuneiform medical texts of the Nineveh library, it is fitting to acknowledge which of the many such tablets in the British Museum was the first to be discussed in print by one of the Assyriological pioneers of the 19th century. The answer proved to be the large Nineveh tablet numbered K 191+, a study and translation of which was given as early as 1850 by the Oxford Assyriologist and polymath A.H. Sayce (1846–1933), who published his article entitled ‘An ancient Babylonian Work on Medicine I’ in the journal Zeitschrift fur Keilschriftforschung II/1: 1–14. Curiously, it is exactly this tablet, part of the ancient medical therapeutic series entitled ‘If a man suffers from a cough’, that the international team were jointly reading under the editorship of Dr. Krisztian Simko when this Newsletter report was prepared. It is only fitting to state that everyone was astonished when they saw what Sayce had been able to accomplish at so early a stage of Assyriological work, for he had achieved an extraordinary level of understanding of this ancient technical literature with no published work by other scholars to depend on, although it is probable that T.G. Pinches, then in the department, might have helped. In tribute to our early predecessor, we illustrate Sayce’s treatment printed in a cuneiform font, a hand copy of the same text and a modern digital photograph for comparison.

10 March, by Xun Liu

Over the next few months, I would like to offer a series of brief reports on shamanism, including its role in everyday life and healing. As an introduction, I would like to give a short overview of shamanism and early shamanic research in this blog.

Shamanism, as we know it today, is concentrated in Northeast Asia, North and South America, and Northern Europe. Rooted in ancient tribal culture, the native beliefs in these areas cannot be described as a single particular religion, but the religious practices in theses region have an important commonality: shamanism. Especially in Siberia and Central Asia shamanism has been the dominant religious practice since ancient times.

Whether the French priest André Thévet first visit to Brazil in 1557 or the colonization of Siberia in the 17^th century by the Russians (Narby; Huxley 2001, 1), seen from the point of view of early travelers and enlightenment scholars, shamanism represented a form of religion which is “uncivilized, wild and untouched by culture.” (Tomaskova 2013, 87) It was not until the late 19^th century that some anthropologists began to study these societies from a neutral point of view. Since the beginning of the 20^th century, anthropologists have improved their methods of examination, which led them to write many detailed reports about shamanism and its practices (Narby; Huxley 2001, 3). Not to be overlooked at this time is the Greenlandic – Danish anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, “father of Eskimology”.  Knud Rasmussen’s expeditions from 1902 to 1934 and his boyhood life experiences in Greenland provided primary sources of Inuit culture and traces of its shamanic aspects. With this kind of continuous refinement of observation methods, many scholars have tried to redefine shamanism by improving their theories during this period.

In 1964 (first published in French in 1951) Mircea Eliade published his famous book “Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,” and shamanism suddenly became a worldwide popular topic. First, he identified shamanism as the oldest form of human religion, but with evolutionary and primitivistic overtones. Second, he focused attention on shamanism exclusively in terms of the psychological states produced during the practice. He saw the shamanic trance of individual shamans as a general feature of shamanism around the world (Eliade 1989). Eliade’s theory inspired a generation of academics and created a new public fascination with the field of comparative religions.

In the meantime, anthropologists had also developed a new research methodology: field study or ethnography. This method required anthropologists to live with local people, to participate in their activities, and thus to observe them objectively and impartially. Through these careful observations of shamanic activities, anthropologists found a rich and internally consistent way of understanding the shamanic world. Since then, scholars interested in indigenous beliefs have started to explore the history of shamanism worldwide (Tomaskova 2013).

How can we determine that any particular indigenous belief belongs to the category of shamanism? Scholars before Eliade saw shamanism as a regional cultural phenomenon in Siberia, North America, and its adjacent regions. After Eliade proposed his trance theory, it became a defining criterion for shamanism. Although current academics have other points of view about this theory, it still undeniably inspired many scholars at that time. According to this criterion, the shamanic phenomenon can be found in most parts of the world and it is, therefore, a global phenomenon. Eliade also introduced the concept of “substratum”, maintaining that shamanism, which is widespread in Asia and America, originated from the substratum of the Palaeolithic cultures of Asia and Europe. Whether shamanism actually existed since Palaeolithic, is still a major point of discussion by present-day researchers. But, at least, based on evidence such as the deer stone at Ushkin User (Fitzhugh 2009) and deer-bovine at Kalbak-Tash (Jacobson 1992), we may be able to track the history of shamanism back to the bronze age.

As the world has become more and more interconnected, the study of shamanism has spread to other regions beyond Siberia. The American anthropologist Peter T. Furst further proposed an “Asian-American shamanism” model based on Eliade’s substratum theory. In his view, there are many commonalities between Asian and American shamanic forms, both in general and in specific characteristics. The main commonalities include body deformation and transformation, the three-level universe, the “axis mundi” that connects the different levels of the universe, trance during the ritual practice, animal spirit as the helper, and the use of hallucinogenic drugs (Furst 1973/1974). In short, shamanism can be applied to customs that are thought to have arisen independently in different parts of the world (Lewis 1971).

More recently the research of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on Shamanism in the Amazonian region has garnered a lot of attention. In one article of his from 2004, he especially noted the non-differentiation between humans and animals, as described in mythology. Many “natural” species or entities were originally human. Many animal species as well as non-human beings, are supposed to have a spiritual component that qualifies them as “people”. The physical form of each species is a shield that conceals an internal humanoid form, usually only visible to the particular species or of “trans-specific” beings such as shamans. This internal form is the soul or spirit of the animal. Besides the relationship between humans and animals, he also mentioned the relationship between humans and nature. For example, cultivated plants may be conceived as blood relatives of the women who tend them, or game animals may be approached by hunters as family members. Shamans can treat animals and other non-human being creatures as either supporters or an enemy (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 463-484).

These non-human spirits and their forms, names, and numbers differ from region to region. However, it is generally through that these spirits would protect the shamans during their trances and act as a “messenger” which speaks through the shaman’s voices and brings the god’s answer (Eliade 1989, 89). Jacobson also mentioned in his article that shamans may be given protection and power through implements and clothing formulated in terms of bodies and powers of sacred animals. “The shamans did not only assume the powers of animal helpers during a shamanic ritual but also became that animal and were reborn into its body and knowledge (Jacobson 1992).”

There is an integral element that regularly appears in cultures in which shamanism plays a role and, that is, of course, the shaman. So, who are the shamans and what role do they play in shamanic practices of daily life and society? And what specific gender do they belong to? Is there only one shaman, or are there many different types of shamans? In my next blog, I will focus on shamans in some typical shamanic cultures, namely in North and Northeast Asia, America, and North Europe.

Bibliography

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2004. Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies. In: Common Knowledge. Duke University Press. Pp. 463-484.

Eliade, Mircea. 1989. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Arkana.

Fitzhugh, William W. 2009. Stone Shamans and Flying Deer of Northern Mongolia: Deer Goddess of Siberia or Chimera of the Steppe. In: Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 46, No. 1/2. University of Wisconsin Press. Pp. 72-88.

Jacobson, Esther. 1992. In Search of the Animal Mother: Pre-Shamanic, Shamanic, and Mythic Tradition. In: The Deer Goddess of Ancient Siberia. Brill. Pp. 171 – 213.

Lewis, I. M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Narby, Jeremy; Huxley, Francis. 2001. Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge. Tarcher/Putnam.

Peter, T. Furst. 1973/1974. The Root and Continuities of Shamanism. In: Stones, Bones, and Skin: Ritual and shamanic art. Society for Art Publications.

Tomaskova, Silvia. 2013. Wayward Shamans: The Prehistory of an Idea. University of California Press. Pp. 79-113.

17 February, by Marvin F. Schreiber

Melothesia is an astrological concept of assigning human body-parts to celestial objects that was extant in Greco-Roman astral science. Its conceptual background was the assumed sympathy between macrocosm and microcosm. The limbs were often assigned to zodiacal signs, the internal organs to
planets. It was mainly used in astrological medicine, e.g. to find the assumed heavenly origin of a disease via the affected body part. Different systems of assignment existed side by side, named after the category of celestial object to which the body is connected: decanal, planetary, and zodiacal melothesia.

Decanal melothesia is of Egyptian origin (decans, subdivisions of signs into three parts, are an element of Egyptian astrology). The first securely dated attestation of zodiacal melothesia in Greco-Roman astrological literature is in Manilius, Astronomica (1st century CE); but there is evidence that the zodiacal form, as well as the planetary, was developed in Babylonia.

With a uniform structure such as the twelve divisions of the zodiac, introduced in Late Babylonian astral science in the late 5th century BCE, it became possible to connect the body and the stars in a systematic way. The structure of the zodiac was mapped onto the human anatomy, dividing it into twelve regions, and indicating which sign rules over a specific part of the body. The ordering is from head to feet, respectively from Aries to Pisces. The main document that contains the original Babylonian melothesia is the astro-medical tablet BM 56605. The text can be dated roughly between 400–100 BCE.

The obverse contains a section that resembles the 29th tablet of the diagnostic-prognostic omen series Sakikkû and subsequently a text about twelve stars that are affecting specific body-parts by “touching” them, each followed by a remedy. This text could be seen as a pre-zodiological stage of melothesia.
The tablet’s reverse also consists of two sections: one column on the right contains an astro-medical zodiac scheme (‘stone-plant-wood’ for each sign) in combination with a hemerology, on the left (roughly three quarter of the tablet’s reverse) follows a micro-zodiac table.

The top row of the table consists of twelve squares with the zodiacal signs, below that an equal row with the assigned body-parts. Underneath each sign and body part are vertical sub-columns of squares with the names of animals, accompanied by numbers (referring to the micro-signs). The sequence of body parts in this text was first identified by J. Z. Wee in 2015, who uses the term ‘zodiac man’ for it.

The arrangement is the following:

Another thing that points to a Babylonian origin of melothesia is that the zodiacal form itself already had its forerunner in calendrical melothesia. It can be found in a group of medical texts from Sippar (northern Babylonia) dating to the late 6th or early 5th century BCE, and therefore older than the zodiac. In this form the body-parts are assigned to the twelve months of the Standard Babylonian Calendar.

There are four fragmentary tablets that could be used for a reconstruction of calendrical melothesia: BM 43558+, BM 42385, BM 42407, and BM 42655.

The first three of these texts treat the body-parts in their associated months and describe a therapy for each: ointments with oils, animal fats and healing stones, herbal potions, and short ritual instructions; although a diagnosis is never mentioned. BM 42655 is somewhat different: the text mentions certain
days, together with a stone-plant-wood-scheme that is identical with the zodiacal scheme that appears in the right column on the reverse of BM 56606 (see above). What follows is a sequence of body-parts which is in accordance with the calendrical melothesia documented in the other texts. The calendrical melothesia from the Sippar texts is the forerunner to Late Babylonian zodiacal melothesia, what shows that such a form of healing dates back at least to the late 6th century BCE, and is most likely of Babylonian origin.

The following table is a comparison of the reconstruction of calendrical and zodiacal melothesia.

	Calendrical Melothesia Logogram (Akkadian)	Zodiacal Melothesia
I	IGI.MEŠ (pānū), SAG.DU (qaqqadu) Face and head.	SAG.DU   Head.
II	GABA (irtu), GÚ (kišādu) Chest and neck.	ZI (napištu) GÚ Throat and neck.
III	ŠUII (qātā)   Hands.	Á (aḫu) MAŠ.SÌL (naglabu) Arm and shoulder.
IV	TI.MEŠ (ṣelānu)   Ribcage.	GABA/TI.MEŠ (?)   Chest/Ribcage.
V	ŠÀ (libbu)   Belly.	ŠÀ   Belly.
VI	GÚ.(MURGU) (eṣemṣēru) MURUB4 (qablu) Spine and waist.	GÚ.MURUB4   Spine and waist.
VII	(…)	GU.(DU) (qinnatu)   Buttocks.
VIII	(…)	PEŠ4 (biṣṣūru)   Female Genitalia.
IX	maḫirtu maḫirtu-leg(bone).	TUGUL (gilšu) Upper thigh.
X	DU10.GAM-iṣ (kimṣu) Knee/shin.	kimṣu   Knee/shin.
XI	ÚR.MEŠ (pēnū)   Legs.	ÚR   Leg(s).
XII	ŠUII.MEŠ (?)   ‘Hands’ (error for ‘feet’?).	GÌRII (šēpā)   Feet.

An arrangement of body parts ‘from head to feet’, this scheme, in Akkadian known as ištu muḫḫi adi šēpe, was also used, e.g. in the diagnostic-prognostic omen series Sakikkû. As mentioned above, the obverse of BM 56605 contains some diagnostic omens that resemble omens from Sakikkû. A sequence of twelve tablets (tablets 2–14) of this series is ordered according to the scheme ‘from head to feet’, what maybe inspired the later concept of melothesia in combination with the twelve months or the twelve signs.

Further reading:
Schreiber, M. F. (2019) ‘Late Babylonian Astrological Physiognomy’ in Johnson, J. C. and Stavru, A. (eds.) Visualizing the invisible with the human body: Physiognomy and ekphrasis in the ancient world (Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Cultures 10). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 119–140.

Wee, J. Z. (2015) ’Discovery of the Zodiac Man in Cuneiform,’ Journal of Cuneiform Studies 67, 217–233.

Am Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (MPIWG) wird 2022 mit der Internationalen Max Planck Research School „Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities“ (IMPRS-KIR) eine neue internationale Graduiertenschule zum Thema der historischen Wechselwirkungen zwischen Wissen und Wissensressourcen starten. Sie basiert auf einer Kooperation des MPIWG mit der Freien Universität Berlin, der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin und der Technischen Universität Berlin im Rahmen des Berliner Zentrums für Wissensgeschichte. Am Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (MPIWG) wird 2022 mit der Internationalen Max Planck Research School „Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities“ (IMPRS-KIR) eine neue internationale Graduiertenschule zum Thema der historischen Wechselwirkungen zwischen Wissen und Wissensressourcen starten. Sie basiert auf einer Kooperation des MPIWG mit der Freien Universität Berlin, der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin und der Technischen Universität Berlin im Rahmen des Berliner Zentrums für Wissensgeschichte.

An der Graduiertenschule werden Promovierende darin ausgebildet, Wissen, Ressourcen des Wissens sowie die vielfältigen Wechselwirkungen zwischen diesen beiden Kategorien zu analysieren. Im Zentrum des Programms steht eine „historisch-politische Epistemologie“, die eine Vielzahl historischer Ressourcen der Wissensentstehung in den Blick nimmt: politische Systeme, technische Infrastrukturen, soziale Interaktion, materielle Objekte und Medientechnologien.

Mit den Dissertationen wird die Wissensgeschichte an den Schnittstellen wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen neu gestaltet. Auf der einen Seite stehen die Wissenschafts-, Technik- und Medizingeschichte und -philosophie (HPSTM: History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine), auf der anderen Regional Studies, Global Studies, Science & Technology Studies (STS), alle Felder der Geschichtswissenschaften, Medienwissenschaften, Museumswissenschaften, Archäologie, Kunstgeschichte, Literaturwissenschaft, Philologie, Umweltwissenschaften und Forschung im Bereich der Digital Humanities. Die Studierenden werden darin geschult, innovative Forschungsmethoden anzuwenden. Sie werden zu Fachgrößen ausgebildet, die in der Lage sind, die dringend benötigte vergleichende Perspektive, Reflexion und historische Tiefe in die Gestaltung von Wissensgesellschaften weltweit einzubringen und sich in einem breiten Spektrum von Berufsfeldern zu betätigen, ob im Journalismus, in sozialen Medien, Kunst, Museen und Archiven oder im Bereich der Wissenschafts- und Bildungspolitik.

Das Leitungsgremium der IMPRS-KIR, dem Prof. Dr. J. Cale Johnson von der Wissensgeschichte des Altertums an der Freien Universität Berlin beigetreten ist, ist die „Principal Teaching Faculty“, der neun Professorinnen und Professoren der vier Partnerinstitutionen angehören. Sie werden von der Sprecherin, Prof. Dr. Dagmar Schäfer (MPIWG), und den beiden Co-Sprecherinnen Prof. Dr. Viktoria Tkaczyk (HU) und Prof. Dr. Christine von Oertzen (MPIWG/HU) repräsentiert. Ihnen obliegt die Federführung beim Aufbau der neuen Graduiertenschule. An der IMPRS-KIR wird es insgesamt 15 Promotionsstellen geben, die erste Kohorte von fünf Studierenden wird am 1. September 2022 ihre Arbeit aufnehmen.

Für weitere Informationen zu IMPRS-KIR klicken Sie bitte hier.

NinMed makes available for the first time the world’s most standardised, structured and systematised corpus of medical literature prior to Galen: the „Nineveh Medical Encyclopaedia“ from the library of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria (669-c.630 BC).

The project is funded by a Wellcome Research Resources Grant, with the title „Introducing Assyrian Medicine: healthcare fit for a king“ (220149/Z/20/Z), 2020-2023.

NinMed benefits from resources developed by the Ashurbanipal Library Project, and the BabMed project.

On December 10, 2021 NinMed was mentioned in a Times’ article, written by Sara Tor: “Assyrians couldn’t face the bald truth 2,600 years ago. The secrets of clay tablets, thought to be the world’s first encyclopaedia for medicine, are being revealed at last – including a bizarre and complex remedy for hair loss.”  

The International Max Planck Research School “Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities” (IMPRS-KIR) invites applications for

5 doctoral positions, to begin on September 1, 2022.

Each position will run for 3.5 years, with the possibility of extending once by six months. The IMPRS-KIR is a new, research-driven PhD program based in the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine (HPSTM). It is a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin. The IMPRS-KIR will trace the deep entanglements of knowledge and its resources from a long-term and global perspective. Key to its agenda is a “historical-political epistemology” that highlights how knowledge is shaped historically by a great variety of resources – political systems, technological infrastructures, social interaction, material objects and media
technologies. Knowledge, in turn, is understood as a means to define and unlock such resources, while being, in and of itself, one of the key resources of human culture.

The School offers training in historical-political epistemology, combining HPSTM with regional and global studies, Science & Technology Studies (STS), all fields of history, media studies, museum studies, archaeology, art history, literary studies, philology, environmental studies, and digital humanities research. Prospective doctoral students with projects on any specialty and period within these and related fields are invited to apply.

The doctoral positions are open to applicants of all nationalities holding a Master’s degree (or equivalent) in the aforementioned fields and having proficiency in English, and, preferably, in one or more additional languages. Candidates are expected to be able to present and discuss their work and
that of others in English; dissertations may be submitted in German, English, or any of the supervisors’ working languages. Selection criteria relate to the excellence of the individual candidate and project and the closeness of the project’s fit with the School’s agenda.

The IMPRS-KIR is located at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Dahlem, Berlin. Students will work in a stimulating international and interdisciplinary research environment.

The School’s program entails one year of courses held in conjunction with the three Berlin universities involved in the IMPRS-KIR (FU, HU, TU), as well as mentored reading groups, workshops, training in digital humanities methods, a tailored coaching program, and language courses. A research budget will be available for travel to archives worldwide. Additionally, students may opt to
spend up to one semester at one of our international partner universities (University of Pennsylvania, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Singapore University of Technology and Design).

The PhD degrees will be awarded by one of the Berlin university departments represented in the Principal Teaching Faculty. Additionally, an IMPRS certificate of the Max Planck Society will be awarded.

Applicants are asked to submit the following materials:
• a cover letter with a personal statement of your motivation for applying to the IMPRS-KIR (max. 1,000 words)
• a dissertation proposal (max. 2,500 words, excluding bibliography) including working title, abstract (max. 250 words), research topic and state of the art in the field of study concerned, research questions and objectives, methodology, short description of the project’s feasibility and how it would be carried out (including a list of archives if applicable), bibliography (max.- 30 titles)
• a curriculum vitae (1–2 pages)
• copies of degree certificates/proof of the finishing date of your Master’s degree
• transcript of grades achieved during your Master’s studies
• proof of fluency in English (preferably at level C1, but at least at level B2). If English is your native language or if you went to a university where the language of instruction was English, you do not need to submit an English certificate.
• contact details of two academic referees. Our Selection Committee will contact referees for shortlisted applicants.

Please submit these materials as separate PDF documents, exclusively through the following application portal: https://recruitment.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/position/19628037

Only complete applications submitted via the application portal will be accepted. The portal will close on January 31, 2022, 23.59 Central European Time.

The IMPRS-KIR aims to foster diversity within its four collaborating institutions. We welcome applications from all qualified individuals regardless of age, disabilities, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion or sexual orientation

For more information, please consult the FAQs on the website of the MPIWG: https://www.mpiwgberlin.mpg.de/research/departments/imprs

For further inquiries about the new PhD program and the recruitment process, please contact Sophie Schwarzmaier: sschwarzmaier@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
For questions about the application portal, please contact Tanja Neuendorf: applications@mpiwgberlin.mpg.de

Please note that we cannot consider applications sent by email or post. The email addresses given above are only for your questions.

24. November 2021, by Mathieu Ossendrijver

In October 2021, the ZODIAC project brought me to Istanbul for an eagerly awaited research visit to the cuneiform collection of the Ancient Orient Museum (Eski Şark Eserleri Müzesi). The Ancient Orient Museum belongs to the Archaeological Museums complex, which is located near the Topkapı palace in downtown Istanbul. The building overlooks Tophanı park, where one can also visit a History of Science museum, apart from admiring its ancient trees and squeaking parrots. The Ancient Orient Museum was designed by a French architect under the guidance of Osman Hamdi Bey – the Ottoman official, scholar, writer and painter, who was the founding father of archaeology and museology in the Ottoman empire.

The purpose of my visit was to study Babylonian astronomical tablets from Uruk. They came to light in 1912/13 during the first excavation campaign of the German Orient Society (Deutsche Orientgesellschaft). How did they end up in Istanbul? In accordance with the regulations of the Ottoman empire, to which Iraq belonged at that time, the finds were divided between Berlin and Istanbul. The 1912/13 campaign was the only one covered by these regulations. World War I brought an end to the German excavations in Iraq and when they were resumed in 1928, the Ottoman empire no longer existed. From then on the finds were sent to Baghdad. In the early 1940s the tablets were catalogued by the German Assyriologist Fritz Kraus, who was then in exile in Istanbul. Kraus identified about 100 astronomical tablets, for the most part small fragments of tables with computed data for the planets, the moon, and the sun – a type of texts known as mathematical astronomy. As it turns out, only very few astronomical tablets from the 1912/13 campaign ended up in Berlin. Most of the astronomical fragments were published by Otto Neugebauer in „Astronomical Cuneiform Texts“ (1955). My own investigation is part of an ongoing project that will result in a new edition and analysis of the Babylonian tablets with mathematical astronomy.

Where in Uruk do the tablets come from and who wrote them? The documentation about their findspots is incomplete, but it is believed that they were excavated near the Rēš temple, residence of the Babylonian skygod Anu and his spouse Antu. The fragments date from about 250-160 BCE, when Babylonia was under Seleucid rule. At that time the Rēš was Uruk’s main temple and an important center of Babylonian scholarship, comparable only the Marduk’s temple Esagila in Babylon. The tablets were produced by scholarly priests connected to the Rēš. Originally they were probably stored in one or more libraries within the temple – later excavations uncovered the remains of one such library in the south-eastern gate of the temple complex. For an animated reconstruction of the Rēš during this period see https://vimeo.com/62772222.

What is written on these tablets? Babylonian mathematical astronomy is all about the motion of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), the moon and the sun. A defining feature of the computations is that positions (longitudes) are expressed as a zodiacal sign and a number of degrees within the zodiacal sign. Some computations also deal with the distance of a planet or the moon above or below the ecliptic, which is the circle through the center of the zodiac. Babylonian scholars created the zodiacal framework near the end of the fifth century BCE. They named 12 zodiacal signs after nearby constellations, starting with the Hired Man (Aries), and ending with the Tails (Pisces). Each sign was divided into 30 units corresponding to 30 modern degrees of arc. All computations are executed and expressed in the 60-based number system known as sexagesimal place value notation. For instance, 10;0,45 Aries denotes a position in 10 degrees, 0 arcminutes and 45 arcseconds = 10 + 0/60 + 45/60² degrees of Aries. A special sign – the so-called Glossenkeil – was used for indicating vanishing digits („0“) within a number.

            The tables were filled from top to bottom and from left to right like Excel spreadsheets. Having filled the top row with initial values, each column was filled from top to bottom by „updating“ the numbers from one to the next instance of a phenomenon, or from day to day, depending on the type of table. The fragment from Istanbul shown above belongs to a table with daily positions of the moon. By zooming in on a few positions, we can recognize a pattern:

(day) 12: 30;08,40 (Capricorn),

(day) 13: 12;23,50 Aquarius ,

(day) 14: 24;57 (Aquarius),

(day) 15: 7;48,10 Pisces.

On day 12 the moon is said to be in 30;08,40 degrees of Capricorn. This number appears unusual for two reasons. First, it contains an extra „zero“ (Glossenkeil), which was added to indicate that the 30 and the 8 are separate digits and not a single digit 38. Secondly, the position is actually beyond 30 degrees of Capricorn, in the first degree of Aquarius. But this is how the scholars in Uruk usually expressed a position in the first degree of a zodiacal sign. In order to see the promised pattern in the numbers, we compute the differences from day to day:

from day 12 to 13 = 12;15,10 degrees,

from day 13 to 14 = 12;33,10 degrees, from day 14 to 15 = 12;51,10 degrees.

These differences represent the moon’s daily motion along the zodiac. We can easily see a pattern now, because they increase by 18 in the second digit. The value 0;18 is used throughout the tablet. It is repeatedly added until the moon’s daily motion reaches a maximum, and then repeatedly subtracted until it reaches a minimum, etcetera, resulting in a „zigzag sequence“. Only the positions in the zodiac were written on the tablet, not the zigzag sequence that was used for computing them. The Babylonian scholars also used such zigzag sequences for modeling periodic variations in the motion of the planets and the sun.

The Babylonian evidence for mathematical astronomy is limited to Babylon and Uruk. But some of this knowledge, including the most complex algorithms for computing positions of Mercury or the moon, somehow made it to Greco-Roman Egypt, where they show up in Demotic ostraca and Greek papyri. The project ZODIAC aims to develop a convincing account of this remarkable phenomenon of the cross-cultural transfer, translation and adaptation of Babylonian astronomical methods and the associated astrological practices.

25. October 2021, by Michael W. Zellmann-Rohrer

The origins of the „time-lords“ in Greek astrology (chronokratores), rulers of sequential and cyclical periods in a human life whose calculation relates to that of the lifespan, remain to be explained. Our earliest references to them as a cohesive system are in the work of the astrologer Vettius Valens of Antioch, who wrote in the mid-second century CE. With little in the way of introduction, Valens speaks of 129-month periods assigned by turns to the five planets and two luminaries, each of which also takes a subdivision of a fixed length (Sun: 19 months; Moon: 25 months; Mercury: 20 months; Venus: 8 months; Mars: 15 months; Jupiter: 12 months; Saturn: 30 months), during which it has special influence over incidents in the life of the individual. Claudius Ptolemy, in keeping with his more systematic approach, at least situates the chronokratores in relation to the more familiar natal astrology, that is, as a check on the appropriateness of predictions to various stages in a human life, while also developing a more sophisticated system of subdivisions. Hephaestion of Thebes claims ancient Egyptian origins for the system in broad terms, without further specifics.

In the mass of original horoscopes in the Greek papyri from Roman Egypt, we have robust evidence for the fact of the practice of astrology but so far disappointingly little detail on how it was practiced. A new attestation of the system of the chronokratores allows us to glimpse one way in which the raw data of the traditional horoscopes, which essentially present the planetary positions at birth, could have been used. That is, these positions would have informed the arrangement of the sequence of chronokratores, which in turn could predict more specific aspects and moments of a person’s life than the general characteristics assigned by the constellations of celestial bodies at birth.

In a forthcoming article in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, within the framework of the Zodiac project hosted in the Institut für Wissensgeschichte des Altertums, I publish an extensive Greek horoscope on papyrus from the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in the Roman period. But it is a „horoscope“ only in the broad sense: it is surely the work of an experienced astrologer, but it does not in fact tell us anything directly about the moment of a client’s birth, but rather gives detailed predictions for this person’s life, at least as far as early adulthood (where the papyrus breaks off), based on the cycle of the chronokratores. This post focuses on another refraction of the celestial chronokratores „on the ground.“ In a papyrus codex of some 36 folia (PGM IV), probably part of an archive of magical and alchemical manuscripts owned in the region of Egyptian Thebes in Late Antiquity, mixed in among rituals for divine revelation, exorcism, and adjuration of supernatural entities for various purposes, we find an excerpt from what must have been a longer sequence of predictions from the course of the chronokratores in the lifetime of an anonymous person. It would be tempting to place that person in turn somewhere in the textual tradition of this codex: the owner, for whom it was copied (if not in fact the copyist), or the owner of an older manuscript that served as source for part of this compilation and copying? The excerpt begins at the age of 53 years, 9 months, which is precisely the start of the sixth 129-month period of a lifespan. The period as a whole is assigned to Mercury, with subdivisions for the standard lengths of months to Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn, in that order. For the subdivisions assigned to the Sun, Mars, the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn, short forecasts are added: in the first, the individual is encouraged to „undertake that which you seek“ (sc. to do; or understand perhaps, „what you are asking about“), and in the rest simply advised whether the time is „good“ or „bad.“

In this context we can also observe the integration of astrological doctrines, but of the catarchic or judicial as opposed to natal branch, with magic in Egypt of the Graeco-Roman and late ancient periods. This is a ritual handbook in the form of a papyrus book-roll (PGM VII: for images see here) roughly contemporary with the Theban codex. Among contents broadly similar to the latter, we find a lunar calendar for the timing of the sorts of ritual procedures generally found in the codex, structured on the principle of the zodiac: that is, for example, when the Moon is in Sagittarius, it is a good time to make invocations to the Sun and Moon, when it is in Aquarius and Aries, to perform various kinds of love-magic, or when it is in Gemini and Cancer, to undertake rituals to win favor and produce amulets, respectively. This same manuscript also coopts the Greek names of the zodiac signs, along with associated occult names and pictorial signs (charakteres), as talismanic elements to be inscribed in a ritual for obtaining a significant dream in oneiromancy (dream-divination). The appearance of astrology within the magical papyri raises the question, which calls for further study, of the relations between „magicians,“ that is, practitioners of the individualistic, instrumental religion of the rituals attested in handbooks like the two discussed here, and astrologers. Could these two sets of personnel have overlapped in part, or could they have exchanged technological expertise in the form of technical literature?            

The ultimate origins of the chronokratores, as those of not a few other astrological concepts with wide later currency, remain to be elucidated. We hope to shed further light on such questions in the course of the Zodiac project, testing among other things the claim by Hephaestion of Egyptian origins and comparing this system in detail with the idiosyncratic lifetime-periodization of the „Old Coptic Horoscope“ of 95 CE. The implication of the chronokratores and of the zodiac in the complexities of knowledge transfer, and of the wider landscape of religion and culture, in Graeco-Roman and late ancient Egypt already suggests interesting results for the history of knowledge.

Text by Michael W. Zellmann-Rohrer, Freie Universität Berlin, ERC-Projekt „ZODIAC – Ancient Astral Science in Transformation“.