4 - Babylonian and Assyrian records of eclipses

Summary

Introduction

More celestial observations are preserved from Babylon than from any other contemporary civilisation. Yet until about a century ago, when large numbers of clay tablets devoted to astronomy began to be unearthed at the site of Babylon, little was known about the achievements of the skywatchers of this once great city. What could be established was mainly based on ancient Greek texts and the Old Testament. Both the Prophet Isaiah (e.g. 47:13) and the ancient Greek writer Strabo (Geography, XVI, 1.6) stress the Babylonian preoccupation with astrology. As noted in chapter 3, the ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (Library of History, II, 9) implies that the lofty ziggurat – built during the reign of Nebuchadrezzar II (604–563 BC) was used as an observatory. Figure 4.1 shows a schematic view of Babylon in the days of Nebuchadrezzar II – as visualised by Herbert Anger (Unger, 1931, figure 7).

Among writers of the ancient Greek and Roman world whose works are still extant, only the great Alexandrian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (c. AD 150) hints at the true scale on which celestial observation was practised at Babylon. In his Mathematike Syntaxis (Mathematical Systematic Treatise) – which later became known as the Almagest – Ptolemy specifically mentions sets of Babylonian eclipse observations to which he had access. Examples of his comments are as follows:

(i) First, the three ancient eclipses which are selected from those observed in Babylon…

[Almagest, IV, 6; trans. Toomer (1984, p. 191).]