Freie Universität Berlin

Tagesspiegelbeilage vom 02.07.2022

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.

2 May 2022, by Ilaria Bultrighini

As part of my previous role as member of the ERC project Calendars in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Standardisation and Fixation (University College London; PI: Prof Sacha Stern; 2013-2018), I investigated the origins and development of the seven-day week in the Roman Empire. Despite its interest and obvious relevance to the present, the early history of the seven-day week had not been systematically studied before. The only comprehensive study of the seven-day week in antiquity up to then was a book published by Colson in 1926. Yet, the wealth of epigraphic and documentary evidence that has subsequently been discovered made Colson’s work outdated. As part of my research, I searched for, collected, and analysed references to individual days of the week and to the seven-day week as a whole across the entire corpus of epigraphic, documentary, and literary sources in Greek and Latin from throughout the Roman Empire. This relatively large body of evidence covers the whole Roman Imperial period and Late Antiquity, until approximately the end of the sixth century CE. The main output of this research is a substantial book chapter I wrote jointly with Sacha Stern, which also includes an examination of the early history of the Jewish Sabbath week based on his detailed analysis of relevant Hebrew and Aramaic sources.

The week as known today is the result of the merging of two different cultural traditions: the Jewish, biblical week and the planetary week of astrological origin. Although the idea of dividing the days of the year into cycles of seven days and of naming each of these days reaches far back into biblical antiquity, the seven-day week as a structure of time reckoning was in fact devised in the early Roman Imperial period. In the course of the first two centuries CE the Jewish and astrological traditions gradually converged to create a single, standardised seven-day week. The Christianisation of the week in the fourth century led to its wide diffusion in the Roman Empire, but its mixed cultural origins—Judeo-Christian and astrological—persisted up to Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

In this blog post, I focus on one of these two traditions, the astrological one. The planetary week makes its first appearance in Italy in the second half of the first century BCE. At that time and throughout the first century CE the evidence for it remains limited to the city of Rome and other parts of central-southern Italy. It is only in the course of the second century CE that the planetary week is attested outside of the Italian peninsula, including in the eastern Mediterranean. Still, the evidence suggests that even when the planetary week did reach the East, it remained a considerably more limited phenomenon compared to the western part of the Roman Empire. On this basis, Sacha Stern and I assume that the planetary week is a ‚Roman‘ product. This conclusion differs drastically from earlier scholarship, in which the general consensus is that the planetary week originated from Babylonian, Egyptian, or Hellenistic astrology. Colson did not attempt to pinpoint any specific tradition for its invention, but still presumed a ‘spread from east to west’. Nevertheless, there is in fact no evidence of a planetary week in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Hellenistic world, or anywhere further east, before the second century CE. The evidence suggests, therefore, that the tradition could only have originated in Italy.

The sequence of the planets within the week is as follows: day of Kronos/Saturn (Saturday), day of Helios/Sol (Sunday), day of Selene/Luna (Monday), day of Ares/Mars (Tuesday), day of Hermes/Mercury (Wednesday), day of Zeus/Jupiter (Thursday), and day of Aphrodite/Venus (Friday). This differs from the order of the planets in the Hellenistic astronomical and cosmological traditions, in which the planets were arranged according to their distance from the earth and/or the length of their revolution, originally as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Moon, and in later, Roman sources as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon—the so-called Chaldean order.

The earliest mention of the generally accepted explanation for the order of the planets within the week in the literary sources is by the Alexandrian astrologer Vettius Valens (mid-2^nd century CE), followed a half-century later by the historian Cassius Dio. The theory is based on the role of the seven planets as rulers of hours. The week was mapped out in 168 hours; the seven planets (in the so-called Chaldean order) were assigned serially to the 24 hours of the day, and then to the 168 hours of the week, the planet assigned to the first hour of each day becoming the ruler of that particular day. Therefore each planet was assigned both to specific hours of the day and to a whole day. The resulting sequence runs from the day of Saturn (Saturday) to the day of Venus (Friday). It is thus clear that the planetary week was not founded on any astronomical principle or system; the correspondence of days of the week with the seven celestial bodies is indeed abstract, artificial.

In fact, this concept is attested at least a half-century before Vettius Valens in a fragmentary inscription from the area of Potenza Picena (ancient Potentia) in central Italy, near the Adriatic coast. The inscription has been dated mainly on the basis of letterforms to around 100 CE or possibly earlier, even as early as the Augustan period (27 BCE – 14 CE). The fragment preserves part of a repeating list of planets in the cosmological sequence; each planet is given a number and a letter (B, N, or C) designating it as good (bona), harmful (noxia), or indifferent (communis). In other words, this inscription presents the sequence of planetary hours as described by Vettius Valens and thus suggests that such a scheme was most likely of Italian origin. This would tie in well with the Italian origins of the planetary week Sacha Stern and I are arguing for.

Further reading:

Bultrighini, I. and Stern, S. (2021) „The seven-day week in the Roman Empire: origins, standardization, and diffusion“. In S. Stern (ed.), Calendars in the Making: The Origins of Calendars from the Roman Empire to the Later Middle Ages (Time, Astronomy, and Calendars: Texts and Studies, 10). Leiden: Brill, 10–79.

Colson, F.H. (1926) The Week: An Essay on the Origin and Development of the Seven-Day Cycle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

17 February 2022, 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.

04. Januar 2022, by Andreas Winkler

The practice of astrology in Graeco-Roman Egypt was largely bilingual. Nevertheless, as in many other areas, the documentation in Greek often appears to be more abundant and diverse than that in Egyptian. The published Greek horoscopes cover a wider chronological span and appear to have a wider range of complexity, from simple to elaborate, while the Egyptian horoscopes published to date are generally rather simple. In this blog post, however, I will show that this was not always the case.

Simple horoscopes could be produced by relatively unskilled practitioners. They contained only the most rudimentary data that an astrologer needed to complete his task: the positions of the five planets known in antiquity (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury) plus the Sun and the Moon, which were pinpointed in relation to whole zodiac signs. Whether Greek or Egyptian, a horoscope often provides the date and time of birth, specified down to an hour. The birth hour was needed to determine the rising sign, a last crucial piece of information. A new sign rises above the horizon roughly every second hour. From this sign the “Twelve Places”, each one being equivalent to one zodiac sign, were established. Briefly put, they were thought to govern various areas of a human life, and if a planet was found in one, it impacted this particular aspect.

Some horoscopes provide a more detailed specification of the planetary positions at the moment of birth. The planets can be located down to the degree or even arc minute in a sign. This opens up the possibility to describe further relations of the celestial bodies that could be useful for interpreting someone’s future. Most of these more advanced horoscopes are in Greek, but there are also a few Egyptian examples. O.Ashm.Dem. 633 is a fragmentary potsherd (ostracon) with a text written in hieratic and demotic, published by Otto Neugebauer and Richard A. Parker in 1968.[1] Due to its slightly idiosyncratic nature and incomplete state of preservation, the content of this horoscope was not fully understood in the first edition. Some years ago, however, I had the good fortune of finding a few additional examples of such texts in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. They have helped me to refine the interpretation of the horoscope.

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Unlike most other horoscopes, the piece provides what seem to be two dates (ll. 1–2 and 5). The first places the birth in year 8 of the Queen (Cleopatra VII), day 22 of the month of Pharmuthi (April 22, 44 BCE). The positions of the celestial bodies given next (ll. 3–4 and 6–10) fit the date well, which makes the horoscope one of the oldest from Egypt. That Cleopatra VII is referred to with her title only, however, suggests that the text was written after the Roman conquest.

The second date mentions a year 13. This refers to a year in the 25-year lunar cycle (the time it takes for the Moon to reach the same relative position to the Sun on the same day). The lunar cycle had begun in 57 BCE and the birth fell in its 13th year. The reason for adding this information must have been to more easily pinpoint lunar positions, such as syzygies (opposition or conjunction), important for the horoscope.

What distinguishes the horoscope from other Egyptian ones is not only its richness of detail but also the way the names of the planets, zodiac signs, and other entities are written. Instead of writing out the full names of the planets, which is a common practice in other horoscopes, only one sign was used. Although this practice is already known from astronomical texts and even horoscopes, the set of signs used in the present set of texts deviates to some extent from other texts. For instance, the sign used to write Saturn , a man lifting up his arms, can be understood as representing the two raised arms of the ka-hieroglyph , which could be used to write the Egyptian word for bull. Saturn’s name in Egyptian is “Horus the Bull”. A more complex example is the representation of Mercury, which was associated with the god Thoth, by the heart hieroglyph () . The heart also represents this god. Thoth was often called the heart of the sun god Re, and in contemporary temple inscriptions the word for heart can be written with the hieroglyphic sign of the ibis, one of the animals connected to Thoth. If the heart can be written with the ibis, the bird and thus the god it represents can be written with the heart.

Planets	Writings (without the star determinative)
Sun
Moon
Saturn
Jupiter
Mars
Venus
Mercury

Some names of zodiac signs follow similar principles. Since the ancient astrologers often began the enumeration of the zodiac signs with Aries, it is called “the first one”, written with the Head-in-profile hieroglyph () instead of “Ram”, the more common designation for the sign. Gemini could be written with two eyes (), as in the illustrated example, or with two eyebrows (): the two eyes recall the divine twins Shu and Tefnut, who can be referred to as the two eyes of the sun god. A third example relates to Cancer (not preserved on the ostracon). Most other horoscopes spell out the name of the sign or abbreviate it, but the present text represents it with the hieroglyph of a spine with ribs (). It is unclear whether the shape of the sign brought the animal to mind—the spine representing its body and the ribs its legs—or the hieroglyph indicates the body part to which the zodiac sign was connected in astrological medicine (a doctrine to be discussed in a future blog post).

Zodiac Signs	Writing (without the star determinative)	Transcription
Aries
Taurus
Gemini
Cancer
Leo
Virgo
Libra
Scorpio
Sagittarius
Capricorn
Aquarius
Pisces

The texts provide more than the position of the planet in relation to full signs. They also define these positions down to the degree. This allowed the astrologer to pinpoint in which terms each planet was. The terms denote a division of the zodiac signs, usually into five unequal parts. Each one belonged to a planet. The terms constitute another factor that affects the outcome of the horoscope, depending on whether a planet is in its own terms or in those of another planet.

After the position of the Moon in 20.5° Gemini (l. 4), the terms of Mars located in 18°–24° of the sign, the horoscope continues with another position: “Libra: 6°: Saturn”. What does it refer to? Although it is not explained on the ostracon, the position coincides with the last full Moon before the birth took place. This position is also related to the terms, in this case those of Saturn, which covered the first six degrees of that sign. Other horoscopes of this kind display a similar pattern. It is known that also Graeco-Roman astrologers, for instance Vettius Valens, used such points to calculate the length of the lifetime of the person for whom the horoscope was cast. Perhaps our astrologers did the same.

Although not much is preserved of the text below the section outlining the positions of the planets, it is clear that the four cardinal points (Ascendant, Descendant, Midheaven, and Lower Midheaven) are reported here and that the next section calculates some of the astrological lots. These are points on the ecliptic that were usually determined by simple principles: the astrologer measured the distance between two celestial bodies and then applied that distance from a third point. Hence exact longitudes of the planets in the zodiac signs were useful here as well. The lots also affected the predictions for a person’s fate.

Two of the most common lots in Graeco-Roman astrological literature—the Lot of Fortune and the Lot of the Daimon—are also mentioned here, along with a few other ones. Among the lots, there are four pairs. The Lot of Fortune was mirrored by the Lot of Misfortune, and the Lot of the Daimon by the Lot of the Evil Daimon, and so on. This seems to be an originally Egyptian feature, and in the names of these lots there is a striking resemblance to the terminology used for the twelve places. This underlines the development of these concepts from the same set of ideas (but that is another topic for a future blog post).

Translation	Writing	Transcription
Daimon
Evil Daimon
Fortune
Misfortune
Life
Death
Flesh/Limb(s)
Illness

In conclusion, these texts firmly refute the impression that astrologers working in the Egyptian language were satisfied with casting only simple horoscopes, while more sophisticated specimens required access to Greek.

This post has only scratched the surface of the content of these horoscopes. A fuller treatment will appear in a forthcoming paper in Studien zur altägyptischen Kultur 51 (2022).

Further Readings: A. Winkler, “Stellar Scientists: The Egyptian Temple Astrologers”, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 8 (2021), 91–145, esp. 130–34 (click here).

[1] O. Neugebauer & R.A. Parker, “Two Egyptian Horoscopes”, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 54 (1968), pp. 231–35.

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“.

The ARTE documentary film „Trésors de Mésopotamie“, respectively „Mesopotamien – Archäologen retten, was zu retten ist“ was broadcasted on Arte on September 25, 2021 with participation of Mathieu Ossendrijver, the Principal Investigator of the ZODIAC project.

Mesopotamia – as it is called because of its location between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – is in what is now Iraq. The land of Sumer, Babylon, the Gilgamesh epic, the rebel Nimrod and the legendary Tower of Babel: These names still stand for what was once Mesopotamia. In 2014, when the terrorist militia of the so-called Islamic State destroyed the most important archaeological sites of northern Mesopotamia, the ancient culture came back into the public eye. The propaganda video images staged by IS, which show the destruction of cultural treasures, went around the world. The ARTE documentary explores the question of the legacy of this civilization that IS terrorists wanted to destroy forever. Iraqi writer and journalist Jawad Bashara mobilized a group of archaeologists and Iraqi citizens to oppose the planned eradication of these pillars of civilization. In a race against time, Jawad Bashara and his supporters are trying to save the ruins, monuments and works of art spread all over Iraq and to restore them using the latest digital technology.