Ep. 490 Transcript: Mesopotamian Astrology

The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 490, titled:

Mesopotamian Astrology

With Chris Brennan and M. Willis Monroe

Episode originally released on May 27, 2025

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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com

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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released June 18th, 2025

Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is M. Willis Monroe, and we’re gonna be talking about the history of Mesopotamian astrology. So hey, thanks for joining me today.

WILLIS MONROE: Thanks, Chris. My pleasure.

CB: Yeah. So tell me a little bit about your background. So you are a professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies that specializes in ancient Mesopotamia, right?

MWM: That’s right, yeah. So I’m an assistant professor at the University of New Brunswick in the province of New Brunswick in Canada, although I’m originally from the States. And yeah, my position here is teaching the history, archeology, texts of the ancient Near East. For me, that primarily focuses on the history of Mesopotamia. But I also teach a little bit of Egypt and Anatolia as well, things like the Hittites from Anatolia. But this is a pretty big topic, so my colleagues in my department teach Greece and Rome, but I teach, you know, 3,000 years of Mesopotamian history and archeology and text. So it’s a lot of ground to cover, but it’s something that is not offered everywhere. So I think the students really like getting to hear about Hammurabi and Gudea and things like astrology from Babylonia, because they’re not often available for them.

CB: Nice. Brilliant. And what languages do you have a background in order to do this work?

MWM: Yeah. So we have to learn a lot of ancient languages! Primarily I work – well, so entirely I work in script, and I make a – there’s a really important distinction between script and language, right? Like, the forms that we write in and then the language that we speak and think in.

So I work entirely in a script called cuneiform, which is a wedge – literally means wedge shape in Latin – a wedge-based script written primarily on clay from ancient Mesopotamia. So modern day Iraq, Syria, a little bit of Turkey, Iran, and some other places. This is a script with a very long history; we can go into that in a little bit later. But the languages that it was used to write are primarily languages like Akkadian and Sumerian. Akkadian is a Semitic language like Hebrew and Arabic – modern Hebrew and Arabic – although it relates to the ancient forms as well. And Sumerian is a language isolate. So that means it has no related known languages in the world. It stands alone. There’s other contemporary languages like that that are isolates. They’re very interesting for linguists to study. But Sumerian is probably our first recorded language in the world, and cuneiform was probably invented to write Sumerian just about 5,000 years ago.

CB: Brilliant. All right. Well, that takes us right into our topic, which is – let’s like, set the stage for what we’re gonna be talking about and especially the geographical area of Mesopotamia and like, the time period and, as you were saying, the arrival of writing was – because this is one of the first cultures in the world to develop a written script, right?

MWM: Yeah. So the long story of writing is really fascinating. I mean, it probably takes, you know, nearly a thousand years to get going. So we start somewhere around 4,000 BCE in what is now modern day Iraq, but it would have been the, you know, ancient Mesopotamia, Fertile Crescent area. An increase in urbanization, right? So these people start settling down in cities, taking advantage of really bountiful – the riverine environment of the Tigris-Euphrates, after which Mesopotamia is named – the land between the rivers. And these urban environments became increasingly dense, increasingly specialized, and the kind of story that we tell now is that as they became larger and more dense and more specialized and kind of increasing need for bureaucratic accounting to keep track of, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of sheep or cattle at a time, or you know, acres upon acres of barley fields and date groves, they had to invent ways to keep track of these numbers. Right? And then there’s a really interesting interplay between how our memory works and how we record things and we write things down, literally.

So this interplay is kind of, you know, for instance, humans can remember stories really well. Like, oral storytellers. We’re great at telling stories to each other. But if you have to remember something like 3,527 bushels of wheat in a month, and you have to recall that number, that’s really hard. That’s not something that we can do well, right? We can recall a great story about a hero like Gilgamesh, and we can tell that story to many people. But recording these really specific numbers is hard. And so what the people who were living in Mesopotamia at the time began to do is they began to use things like clay tokens, right, to represent small numbers. They could keep these in a bag, for instance, and then over a month they could keep adding to them as someone brought them cows to donate to the temple or something, right, so you could keep adding tokens to a bag. And that bag was assigned to someone, and at the end of the month you could count them up. Right? Really easy accounting system.

They started doing interesting things beyond that in that they would, you know, there’s a certain need for let’s say security over these numbers. Right? Because what happens when someone else comes in and starts adding tokens to someone’s bag, right? You wanna have authority in this case. So they started creating hollow clay balls – we call them bullae – and they would put the tokens in these balls, and then they would seal them with a cylinder seal. So like, roll a stone seal across the wet clay, which meant that only the person who had that seal had the authority to create that impression. Right? So you knew it was a secure number.

The problem there is you have to break it open to check the number. So slightly after that, they started impressing the number on the outside so that you could quickly see. Basically, they would just press their like, stylus in for however many numbers were inside. At a certain point after that, they said, well, you know, maybe we don’t need to break it open anymore; we can just press it on the outside, and then they’d flatten that and made a tablet. And our earliest tablets that we have – clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia – these date to over 5,000 years ago – are literally just that. They’re pieces of clay with numbers on them, right? And then they start adding little symbols to say that it’s cows, that it’s for a certain temple, et cetera. And from those simple symbols, they start adding more and more, and that’s where we get writing.

So our earliest texts that we have from ancient Mesopotamia over 5,000 years ago are these texts that detail very simple bureaucratic accounting numbers. Bushels of grain, rations for workers – because workers were paid in standard rations – also grain again, and beer, and things like that. And this was a way for them to keep track of these, you know, really large numbers. When you look at the bureaucratic complexity of these early cities, it’s really stunning. But they had to write them down somehow, and then they literally invented the way to do that themselves.

CB: Brilliant. All right. So yeah, so we get agriculture and suddenly agriculture allows these like, large cities to start flourishing, and then to keep track of things, they develop writing —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — and eventually you start getting like, large civilizations in this era of history – of large civilizations or cities as opposed to most of human history up to this point, which was like, nomadic and traveling —

MWM: Right —

CB: — around.

MWM: — hunter-gatherer type things. Yeah. And there’s some really interesting interplays here. So one, the increasing complexity – you know, this bureaucratic process – it does afford some efficiency, right? So when you’re operating at such a scale, suddenly not everyone has to be concerned with their day-to-day living. Like, their day-to-day, you know, acquiring of calories, for instance. Right? So people can start to specialize. And that’s where we get things like, you know, early diviners and things like that, right? These people who no longer have to be concerned with the agricultural day to day, because now the efficiency of the bureaucracy means they can just buy their food instead of having to grow it themselves. But now there’s a need for other types of things. So we get specialists in terms of government, specialists in terms of religion and science and divination, right? The increasing complexity allows for this specialization within society. So it’s a really radical change at the time.

There’s also fascinating ideas that are coming out of fields like the psychology of religion as well that look at this idea that when people are in hunter-gatherer groups, they’re able to… If there’s like, a big disagreement in the group, right? The group can just split and they can go their separate ways, right? Also the people in your group, you’re generally, you know, you might be related to distantly, so you have some sort of biological need to take care of them. Right? Like, you’re related to them, so you’re happy to give them extra food when they need it.

When people start living in cities, you can’t do that anymore. You’re living in a house next to someone else. Moving is really hard. Your neighbor, you may not have any connection to, right? So why do you have to be good to them, right? This is a big kind of fundamental question. And one of the things that the psychologists of religion who were kind of, you know, playing around with these early ideas, they say, well, maybe this is kind of where religion comes into play. This idea that there’s someone else watching you. Right? I need someone else watching me so that I’m nice to my neighbor, so that I can give my neighbor extra food when they need it, even though we’re not related at all. Right?

So the like, advent of urbanism and this increasing complexity in southern Mesopotamia – you know, in the south of Baghdad, basically, south of modern day Baghdad, that’s where it really kicks off – is fascinating. Not only for writing, but also for social complexity, but also for, you know, maybe where religion starts really becoming a thing. So it’s an incredibly important time period for our own history.

CB: Right. Brilliant. So speaking of religion, one of the things that makes Mesopotamian culture and society so distinct compared to our own or let’s say western society for much of the past 2,000 years was the existence of polytheism. And polytheism was like, a major component in this society, right?

MWM: Yeah. So they had many gods, not unlike a lot of ancient cultures. Right? We see this quite frequently. There’s some interesting models for how gods kind of come about in different places. Right? So like, for instance, a storm god is very common as an early… Like, if you think of like, a history of a pantheon – a pantheon is a grouping of gods – it’s very common that a storm god will be early on, right? And then last for a long time. But so storms are obviously very important for us as humans, right? We experience storms; we think of them as powerful, surprising, et cetera. So storm gods are really common. But Mesopotamia has a very typical pantheon for ancient cultures; it’s got high gods – gods who are high up, literally in space. Right? So they’re sky gods. The big one in Mesopotamia is Anu, who’s the god of the sky.

Then you get other gods who are creator gods, gods of wisdom, gods of secrets, things like that. Gods of love and warfare. So Mesopotamia has Ishtar, whom we’ll talk about later, who’s a lot like this Athena goddess where she’s both sexual love and attraction but also violence and warfare. And it’s this dual identity; it’s really interesting.

One of the models that people now use for thinking about how religion works in polytheistic societies is not necessarily polytheism, but a term called henotheism. And henotheism is probably a more accurate way to describe the day-to-day experience of living in a polytheistic society. Of course, there are people today who live in polytheistic societies like Hinduism and others. But what henotheism kind of posits is that it’s not necessarily that you believe in all the gods equally at all times, but that you have choice gods who you like. And we see this in Mesopotamia very clearly. So for instance, Mesopotamian gods have a city to which they’re assigned. So Shamash and Sippar, for instance. Anu and Uruk. And that’s the city in which they have a chief temple, which is literally their house. The word in Sumerian is “house of the god.” Right? So their temple is the house; they live in the temple. They can travel elsewhere, of course.

CB: Is that the word “bit,” by the way, that’s written “bit?”

MWM: Yeah. In Akkadian, “bit,” yeah, is “house.”

CB: Okay.

MWM: Yep. And it’s still house in Arabic today, in Hebrew today, right? It’s still “bit.” It’s amazing how, like, it has lasted 4,000 years plus.

CB: And that’ll kind of come up later, because the secret places are sometimes —

MWM: Yeah, the bit nisirti, yeah.

CB: Yeah. So there’s this notion of house that comes up later in astrology, basically, with respect to the planets almost having certain signs their houses are – or that they are associated with.

MWM: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That’s the hypsomata, as they’re called. Right, this house of secrets – bit nisirti in Akkadian. This term, house – and it’s actually kind of interesting how that house works, because bit or a – as in Sumerian is the word – up until kind of later late Babylonian astrology, which we’ll talk about, it really just references a physical house or a temple in this case of a god, which is the house of the god. But in the later period, it gets this kind of theoretical operational connotation in the sky, which is really cool.

So to roll back for a second, this idea of henotheism, right, you have a god that you like, but you worship other gods. We see this pretty commonly in that like, you, you know, also names in Mesopotamia in both Sumerian and Akkadian often have what’s called a theophoric element – a god in them. So like, Shamash Protects the Brother will be someone’s name, right? Because you know, that was what they named the kid because they wanted the brother to do well, or the brother before they were born was sick and got better, and so they named their next son “Shamash Protects the Brother” or something. So it’s likely that family really —

CB: As somebody named Christopher, I don’t really resonate with this idea of theophoric names, but —

MWM: Yeah, right?

CB: Yeah. Continue.

MWM: Yeah, and we – I mean, we still have them to some degree, right?

CB: Yeah.

MWM: So it’s likely like, that family would like, you know, primarily go to the Shamash temple and give offerings to the Shamash temple. But, you know, on occasion they might go to Nisaba; they might go to Anu, right? They might go to other gods when they needed something extra or if they felt like it, right? And so this model of how polytheism works, you know, in this henotheistic model – this model where you have like, a chief god that you like, but then other gods that you also observe – is probably the most accurate way to describe what was going on in Mesopotamian religion at the time.

CB: Okay. Yeah, that’s really interesting to me that there are certain cities that were associated with certain —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — gods. And then later the rise and prominence of certain cities would sometimes then impact which gods were more or less prominent in different eras.

MWM: Yeah, definitely. So cities rise and fall. We know this from lots of long history, right? Both economically, politically, socially, et cetera. And we do see this in Mesopotamia. So Anu, for instance, in Uruk rises at times, falls in other times and rises again. And that does have an impact on the type of scholarship that’s produced in interesting ways. But also in how other texts are written, right? The hymns to the gods and things like this come out when certain cities are preeminent. And one particular text we’ll talk about later, the Enuma Elish, right, is all about Babylon and all about Marduk. So the city of Babylon and the god Marduk are totally reliant on Babylon being the preeminent city, right? That is why that text gets written in order to make that case.

CB: Right. And that seems interesting and relevant to astrology, because Marduk became associated with the planet Jupiter. So then you have that major city associated with that god who’s associated with Jupiter, or you have other cities like Harran that have a major temple to the Moon. So that’s kind of interesting that it starts tying in a little bit with astrology to the extent that the gods later get associated with certain planets.

MWM: Yeah. And like, and also, you know, when the Neo-Babylonian king goes off to Harran or goes to other places where the Moon god is preeminent, that becomes the focus of the political situation at that time, right? So there’s a real emphasis not only on thinking about that god, but producing texts that are about that god. So we do see, right, the linkage between a god and a city, and the importance of that city and importance of that god has huge impacts.

And I should also say like, this will come up at other times too, but you know, with cuneiform as a script, it is intensely interlinked. Like, there’s so much systems of association that work within the graphical system of writing. So you know, these scribes who are writing throughout Mesopotamian history, whether they’re writing divination texts, scholarly texts, complex astronomical texts, or even just historical texts or literary texts, they’re constantly playing with these systems of association – not only systems of cultural association, right, between like gods and cities, but also systems of association found in the writing systems. Like, similarity of signs, right? Like, a sign looks like another sign; that’s a system of association that’ll work and is productive for producing new knowledge. And we can get into that later on.

CB: Excellent. All right. So that takes us into the idea of henotheism and there being many gods and the existence of gods. One of the things that started to arise in Mesopotamian culture was divination and the idea that the gods can send signs or can communicate to humans through omens.

MWM: Yeah. So this is a very natural thing, right? We all watch the world around us, and this is something… I work a lot on like, history of science and religion, and the blending of the two and how modern conceptions are kind of, like, you know, create these binaries that don’t really work, especially for the ancient world. But divination is one of the most natural things that we all do, right? Not only are there like, systems of folk divination that we’re all so used to, like, a black cat, right? Like, I only need to say “a black cat,” and we all understand, right, that that’s something to watch out for. Right? Like, we all feel this very viscerally.

So divination – I mean, we have the earliest textual preservation of it, and we’ll talk about it in a second. But we should assume that it has always been part of decision-making process in Mesopotamia. Right? There are —

CB: Right.

MWM: — easy cycles to watch for. Signs in the world around us that predict the future. This is pretty uncomplicated, right? And so divination is not something that’s necessarily created in Mesopotamia, but it’s something that’s very natural of the human experience broadly, right? And —

CB: Right.

MWM: — the very first textual references we get show that it is already operating at the level of kings. Right? So it’s already kind of embedded in the powers of government in Mesopotamia.

CB: Right. So divination is something that almost every major culture around the world has developed at some point or another in different forms, but in Mesopotamia, right as soon as written language starts appearing, like, we start hearing about divination pretty quick. And Mesopotamian society seems to, I don’t know, it’s hard to like, rank, but certainly there was a major focus on divination very early on —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — as you were saying.

MWM: Yeah. So the earliest I would say probably the earliest really concrete evidence we have for divination is happening during the reign of Gudea of Lagash. Right? Gudea is a king about 2100 BC let’s say. He’s a king in the south in Lagash, the city of Lagash. He’s a Sumerian king, so he’s writing and he probably was speaking in Sumerian; we’re not – this is around when Sumerian starts to die out as a language. It is still written throughout the rest of Mesopotamian history, much like Latin was still written up until recently. It becomes this language of scholarship, right? But so Gudea is this king; he’s a great builder. He builds a ton of temples and other things. And he leaves a lot of textual things behind. Right? Writings. He writes a lot about all the things he’s building. And I will say just as a brief thing – we’re really lucky for Mesopotamia. Right? That they wrote on clay, and sometimes on stone.

So other civilizations – Egypt being a close neighbor – they wrote on papyrus. Papyrus rots away instantly when it’s exposed to water, especially in places where the water comes and goes in these, you know, oxygen rich environments. Papyrus is gone, you know, really, really fast. Where papyrus does survive is places like tombs. And that’s why this is something that I talk to my students a lot about – like, you know, our kind of naive conceptions of Egyptian culture are focused on the afterlife because so much of our textual witnesses, so much of the texts that survive, come from these tomb environments, right? So we’re biased by reading what we know about Egypt to think about the afterlife. Mesopotamia’s completely different. Even very different from Greece and Rome, for that matter. In Mesopotamia, they wrote on clay, which means that when someone recorded – and they have literally done this, like, I’ve read these texts, right – they recorded the sale of a single goat to someone else. Right? That is the most ephemeral receipt that you can imagine. It’s a receipt you’d pick up from the, you know, supermarket and throw away within an instant. When someone recorded that single goat transaction and then threw the text away because they no longer needed it, probably like, a week later or something, it’s now survived for over 4,000 years and we have it now. Right? So for Mesopotamia, we’re incredibly lucky that these texts, they chose the medium they did, meaning clay, and that clay survives so well in the archeological record.

So Gudea wrote a lot of things. And we have all of these things because it just so happens that that’s what he chose to write on. Like, that was the tradition. So we know a lot about what Gudea was up to. Gudea was building a lot of things. And one of the things he talks about in building new temples, his main god – again, going back to henotheism – the god he’s most interested in is Ningirsu. So for Ningirsu, he builds a bunch of temples; he refurbishes temples. And as is the tradition then and later in Mesopotamian history, he’s seeking guidance for how to build this temple. He wants to make sure he’s building the best temple for the god that he can. His method of seeking guidance is divination. And it’s a complex kind of interwoven system of divination that operates throughout Mesopotamian history. So he talks about kind of three forms of divination, and they’re tightly interlinked as I just said. He talks about seeing the design of the temple written in the stars, or literally on a tablet of stars. So we can call that astrological information. He talks about having a dream to see this design. Right? So dream incubation. Literally dream divination. Like, you know, going to sleep to receive a message from his god. And then he also sacrifices a goat to read its entrails. This is something that we call extispicy; it’s a form – literally divination by reading organs, usually the liver or lungs or intestines.

So those three forms of divination all operate together to give Gudea the best information that he can get on how to build this temple. And this is a common theme throughout Mesopotamian history that there are forms of what we call unprovoked divination. So these are things that we witness, right? Astrology is a good example of this. But also terrestrial divination. Divination by seeing things like black cats or mold on your walls or moths fluttering in the light, right? These are forms of things that just happen around us, and we interpret those signs as meaningful for us, right, or for other people or for the future or whatever. That form of divination is usually checked. So the veracity of it, the meaning of it is usually checked with a form of provoked divination. This is division that’s widely kind of talked about; it’s even talked about by Cicero back in Roman times, right? He understands this – so even people who practice this understand this division.

CB: Right.

MWM: The provoked form of divination is where you literally do something to get an answer, right? So that’s where you sacrifice a goat and read its liver. That’s where they pour oil into water and look at the patterns. That’s where you light something and watch the smoke, right? And these are used to check the unprovoked, right, so you see something around you in the world, in the sky, on the land, and then you do another form of divination to basically verify the message.

So our earliest —

CB: For like, secondary confirmation is very common.

MWM: Exactly. Yeah. So our earliest textual evidence for divination in Mesopotamia is Gudea doing this practice, right? Seeing stars, having a dream, checking it with a goat liver. And so it shows even at that point, kind of going back to this idea that divination’s really common, right, it shows even at this earliest point where we get the first textual reference for it, it’s already this complex system. Right? It’s already this system that is operational, that is embedded into government, and so it’s working, right? And it continues working like that through Mesopotamian history.

CB: Right. And so already in this text, we also – some people take this, the dream of Gudea, as some of the early evidence that there might be something like astrology starting to develop in terms of associating stars and planets as ominous phenomena that could give signs.

MWM: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Right? So Gudea’s our early example of this. He doesn’t name the stars or planets, but 200, 300 years later, we’re starting to get celestial divination as well where they’re talking about stars and planets in the old Babylonian period.

So it starts really early on. And we can only assume that even at these early periods, the movement of the heavens, which is pretty miraculous, especially one of the things I like to kind of think about, I’ve done a bunch of archaeology, and I excavated in southeastern Turkey for a long time in a pretty rural region. And out there, people in the summer – it’s really, really hot. They sleep on the roof of the house, right? You get above the mosquitos. You get cool breezes. And you stare at the night sky all night long, right? In Mesopotamia, there’s no light pollution. Right? Ancient Mesopotamia there’s – well, little to none, right? There are small fires and things like that. And people are probably sleeping on roofs. We know that the roof is a productive space, even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the roof is used as a space, right? So we know people are going out on the roof; they’re probably sleeping on the roof. Imagine if you were sleeping like, your entire life, right, for summer months – especially you were sleeping on the roof of a house staring at the night sky, night upon night, right? You would see this miraculous, you know, movement night after night, and you would start to notice. I think, you know, when I teach students about the history of astronomy and we talk about, you know, simple models of prediction, simple models of planetary movement, it can seem really hard, right? Like, having to go outside and actually like, look at a planet night upon night and find it, and like, find a viewing angle that works, et cetera. But if you’re sleeping on the roof of your house every night and you get this unimpeded view of a beautiful night sky, these patterns, these cycles would just come naturally, right? And so you know I think it’s not very hard to go from that to early models of planetary prediction, and we can talk about those later on. But we shouldn’t imagine that it’s this big gulf that we need to jump over, right, to get from thinking about the night sky to actually like, knowing how it works. If you see Venus appear on the eastern horizon, you know, for a while, you’re gonna know that that’s gonna happen again.

CB: Right. Both in the sense of periodic phenomenon, but also in starting to occasionally notice some notable or unique thing happening —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — in the sky, and something happening on earth, which they’re making a connection with.

MWM: Yeah, exactly, right? So this is how we think these early divinatory texts – and what I should say also from the outset is that, you know, aside from these small mentions of divination in historical texts like Gudea mentioning how he used it, right, the vast majority of divination – this is astrology and terrestrial divination and liver divination, all forms of divination in Mesopotamia – take the form of lists of omens. Right? So these are lists of occurrences. So just as you said, right, appearance of Venus on the horizon connected to something that happened. Right? Or might happen. There’s some question about the historicity of these and what the relationship is time-wise, chronologically, right? Is it something that is happening at the same time or something that will happen in the future? There’s even some Mesopotamian texts that get into this kind of more theoretical question. But the vast majority of what is preserved for all forms of divination is lists of omens. And they follow a very predictable pattern.

So the pattern is if – in the scholarship, we say “if p, then q,” right? So the protasis and the apodosis. So if something is seen or happens – so a planet stands still, et cetera – then something else is happening or will happen, and that other thing is, you know, the downfall of an empire. Increase in rain. The rebellion of the people, things like that. And so we have just long, long lists of these things. And I will say also this is something that we struggle with in Mesopotamia, especially when it comes into like, the long history of science especially in western civilization, right? We have a real bias towards civilizations that produce theoretical texts, mainly because our modern scientific system works on theory, right? You have a theory of gravity or something, right? Mesopotamia, they didn’t write theory for whatever reason. This is not something that they ever concerned themselves, really, with writing. What they wrote was the results. Right? They wrote these long lists of omens, things they had seen, things that happened, but they never write down like, how they would associate Jupiter to the king, right? You just have to extrapolate that from the hundreds of omens that deal with Jupiter and result in something happening to the king. So it’s hard for us to make the case that this early Mesopotamian thought, right, scholarship on astrology is, you know, really valuable for thinking about how science develops because they lack this theoretical or just chose not to write this theoretical lens that we value so highly today in our society. We think of science as defined by theory and experimentation, and in Mesopotamia, they were doing all the experiments, right? They were doing this like, watching all the time and seeing what happened, but they never wrote down their theoretical understanding which they had to have because they were creating these very complex texts. But they didn’t think it was important to write down.

CB: Right. So instead what we get is we start to see records of writing down these omens of celestial events and some of the earliest ones seem like they’re associated with eclipses. That like, if an eclipse happens, then in this part of the sky, then the king will die and other things like that.

MWM: Yeah. So, eclipses of course, are like, pretty shocking. You know, lunar eclipses – certainly solar eclipses even more so. Eclipses get associated very early on with pretty big events. So downfalls of kings, downfalls of empires, et cetera. The other way that Mesopotamian divination operates is through these rituals called namburbis, and eclipses are really where the namburbis kind of kick off, right? This ritual that you would do to avert the evil of an omen. So an eclipse happens, you know, you check your texts, you figure out what it means, and then you would very quickly, as soon as you can, try to do the ritual to avert, you know, protect the king for instance.

So eclipses are one of the earliest things that we see in divination in terms of, you know, really big events. And at the same time, this whole tradition of rituals develops alongside it to avert this evil, to make it go away, to protect someone, et cetera.

CB: I kept seeing references to this paper from 1987 by a scholar named Peter Huber who —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — dated some, attempted to do some early work on chronology, and he tried to make an argument that there were these three eclipses that were associated with the death of three kings early on possibly, and he concluded that perhaps this could have been the origins of starting to collect omens. Because if this really did happen, then he said no wonder they would have started writing these things down, and —

MWM: Yeah!

CB: I’ve seen some like, you know, questions of whether his dating was correct or whether that’s true or not, but as a parallel in the 20th century, the three kings that died in the British monarchy in the 20th century all died within like, days or like, a week of an eclipse. There were three in succession in the 20th century. So you can kind of see how even if one doesn’t believe in that as a legitimate connection that perhaps something like that could have happened in ancient times as well.

MWM: Yeah, definitely! Like, this is like, that’s an easy association to make, and it’s also really meaningful, right? Kings are gonna care a lot about that. So a couple points that are interesting – one, divination throughout Mesopotamian history is really supported by kings, right, by the government, right? We can talk some more about this later, especially during the Neo-Assyrian period, but like, these astrologers who were watching the night sky and interpreting things are being supported and paid for by the government, right? The kings naturally, if the king knows that there is this historical precedent, kings sometimes die when there’s eclipses, they’re gonna wanna watch out for this all the time. Right? The other point I wanted to make about this is that I think, you know, the question of belief is interesting. I think we can kind of not sidestep it, but if you think from a Mesopotamian perspective, what they’re trying to do is collect as much information as possible. So they’re watching everything, right? Because they know the history happens, things happen all the time, and they’re just trying to find any associations, right, that can help them manage, right? So like, the earliest forms of divination that we can probably think about are things like seasonal change, you know, when to plant, agriculture stuff like this. This is certainly the case in Egypt, right, where the stars will predict the flood of the Nile. Right? You wanna be able to predict this. Not only do you wanna be able to predict it, you can, right? Like, it’s really doable. This works. And it works very early on.

So from kind of a perspective of someone kind of watching the world around you, what you wanna do is collect as much data as possible. Right? You wanna just record everything. And we’ll talk later on about it, Astronomical Diaries in Mesopotamia, but these are the pinnacle of this idea that like, some of this stuff, sure. It might work. Some of it might not. But it’s better to have all the data at your fingertips and just be able to think about, you know, what are the associations that are really holding in our world, and what are the associations that are not? I should also say from like, a history and philosophy of science perspective, in our modern world we make this very strong distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and science studies the natural world. Right? It studies natural phenomena. This is an easy way to define science, but it’s not a way that works when you think about the ancient world. When you go to ancient Mesopotamia, when you go to Greece and Rome, there is no division between the natural and supernatural. You can’t say that a Mesopotamian would understand that the flooding of a river is a scientific fact, and the association between planets in the sky and events on the earth is not a scientific fact. To them, this is all one unified system, and so going back to this idea of collecting as much data as possible, from a Mesopotamian perspective, I want every occurrence that’s ever happening, right, around me because they’re all interlinked in some way.

CB: Right. Yeah. Especially if you believe that a correlation in the past coincided with an event, then you’re gonna want to collect data to see if that might happen again in the future.

MWM: Exactly.

CB: But your point about – your previous point ties us back into henotheism and polytheism, because the planets started to become seen as the gods themselves or as manifestations of some of the gods.

MWM: Yeah. Yeah. So the planets are become the gods, or are the gods from pretty early on. I already mentioned Venus and Ishtar. And there’s other associations as well. And this is not just the god moving through the sky. So Shamash is the Sun god; he’s literally the Sun. Sin is the Moon god; he’s literally the Moon. But it’s also these planets have effects; they’re effective, right? And so this is one of the things we see in medicine very commonly in Mesopotamia, forms of astro medicine where you put medical treatments out under the sky so the stars and the gods can literally impact it, can change it, right – make it more effective. So this belief of planets being associated with gods really runs across the gamut of not just astrology but other forms of scholarship and science.

CB: Right. And to your point about the, you know, thinking about trying to make a division between science versus religion, it’s like you have Shamash as the god of the Sun, but then the Sun also of course is the thing that’s very clearly coinciding with and causing the seasons to happen on earth —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — so you can’t, they’re sort of inextricably linked in that way rather than something that’s being parsed out as separately perhaps.

MWM: Yeah, exactly, right? So this is a really good example of this like, nature, you know, supernatural, et cetera. You know, it’s pretty easy to see how the movement of the Sun affects the weather around you – the temperature seasonally, right? So that’s an easy association to make. So then from there, you can make other associations, right? A really common one is that the Sun is associated with justice because the Sun rises every day and sets every day and sees everything. And so that’s why like, legal texts often talk about Shamash. So Shamash is both the seasonal, you know, creator, but also integral in how law courts work. And so this is why like, picking apart what is natural and supernatural and what is, you know, religion and science is really impossible. Like, it’s so tightly intertwined in ancient cultures, especially ancient Mesopotamia, of course – that’s what I’m, you know, an expert on! But we can’t pull them apart, right? And so then when we think about like, how to define what is rational or non-rational or, you know, irrational, et cetera, you have to put yourself in this position. Like, you have to put yourself in the kind of worldview of a Mesopotamian to think about how they’re operating, right? Think about what are the associations that are meaningful for them in their day-to-day experience. And that’s where, you know, we can really kind of resurrect Mesopotamian scholarship, be it divination, et cetera, as really complex and really interesting for the history of humanity.

CB: Absolutely. So all right, so by the middle of the second millennium, by let’s say 1500, you know, 1,500 BCE, we see evidence of they start writing down omens related to —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — eclipses especially, and then eventually they start compiling all these different omens into a collection. And they eventually create a canonical omen series called the Enuma Anu Enlil?

MWM: Yeah, exactly. Enamu Anu Enlil, which it’s the – this is how we often name texts in the ancient world. So this is the first words of the text, so “when,” “Anu,” and “Enlil.” So this is a long tablet series, very well-preserved, right? We have copies – the kind of canonical copies are during the Neo-Assyrian period, but we have copies early on as well and kind of precursors and stuff like that. This is a long omen series that is dedicated to astrology, right? Dedicated to things seen in the sky. Also earthquakes and kind of storms as well, weather effects. But primarily to things in the sky. And it’s actually divided, right, so the ancient compilers of this text divided it into sections concerned with different planets, Sun and Moon included. And it has also some other interesting things. Tablet 14 is a weird tablet in there. It has to do with – it has a whole scheme for day length, right? For actually modeling the length of day and night over the entire year. It has this pretty complex mathematical model that, you know, will later be superseded by much more complex models in the first millennium. But Enamu Anu Enlil has this pretty complex method for day length calculation embedded into it. And this is yet another example, right, of this way in which all these forms of knowledge are really embedded within each other, right. So omens are right alongside mathematical schemes for daylight. They exist, and the scribes who wrote these were experts in both.

CB: Right. So there wasn’t really a – there wasn’t a distinction like we have today between astronomy and astrology —

MWM: Right.

CB: — but instead they’re one and the same, and the same people are doing both often within the same text.

MWM: Very much so, yeah. So we have, again, you know, we have such a wealth of evidence precisely because of the way clay survives. But we have both during the Neo-Assyrian period, so you know, 900 to 612 or so, and also later periods. We have really good evidence for the types of text that people are writing. So on a cuneiform tablet, sometimes – not always – but if we’re lucky, the scribe will write what’s called a little colophon at the bottom. So cuneiform tablets are generally two-sided; they might have multiple columns if they’re larger, but at the very end of the text, there’ll usually be a horizontal line. And then the scribe will actually write something. And you can think of it like the data you see on the inside cover of a book, right, the kind of Library of Congress type stuff, et cetera. So there they’ll often write who they are, who their father was, who their father’s father was – almost entirely male – and sometimes they’ll write where the text comes from. So they’ll say this is copied from an old writing board; this is copied from this source, et cetera. And then sometimes they’ll give like, the next tablet if it’s in a series, by its tagline, by the first couple words. So this data’s really important, because we can actually reconstruct what an individual scribe was working on. Right? What are all the texts they wrote? So that’s one piece of evidence.

The other piece of evidence that we have, especially during the Neo-Assyrian period, is we have, for instance I mentioned government sponsored scholarships – scribes, et cetera, astrologers – it’s really big during the Neo-Assyrian period. This is probably our best evidence for it. And we have letters written by scribes who want to be employed by the king, and they talk about the things they know. The texts they’ve memorized. You can think of it as like, a CV, right? Like a resume or something. And from this, we see, you know, the wide variety of things that a scribe might be expected to know about when they work for the king. And it’s things like astronomy and astrology, other forms of divination, certain types of rituals that are required for this type of work as well. So really a wide variety of stuff. So it’s really hard to say that there are particular modern genres that we can apply. They of course had their own genres, and these do not map on necessarily to how we consider kind of disciplines of knowledge.

CB: The Enuma Anu Enlil really quickly, I wanted to go back to one point. It consisted of 68 or 70 tablets depending on the version, and it was divided into the Moon section first and then the Sun section, and then —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — weather and earthquakes, and then it had a section for the planets that was called the Ishtar section, which is for Venus.

MWM: Yeah.

CB: So I thought this was really interesting, because it creates a well-known not trinity but triplicity of planets, which is the Moon, the Sun, and Venus which show up again over and over again in Mesopotamian culture. And then it’s interesting because that becomes the sequence of the planetary hypsoma or exaltations with —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — Venus in Pisces and the Sun in Aries and the Moon in Taurus, so that those three are clustered together.

MWM: Yeah. Yeah. So we see this in many places, this kind of creation of these early kind of basically almost like geometrical systems, right? Like, the triplicities and oppositions. They really come out in the first millennium. We see the most kind of advanced version of them in the first millennium, but they may exist earlier on. But this is clearly what the Greeks are borrowing from, and Indian astrology as well, and other places. They’re borrowing these kind of models that the Mesopotamians developed in omen texts and in just the way in which texts are written out. What’s kind of, you know, ironic of course is that they show up in these other places as like, theoretical ideas, right? Like, in there we see the theory, but they’re borrowing traditions that come from Mesopotamia.

So you know, that gives another example of it had to exist in Mesopotamia at some point. Like, they had to have these like, list of planets and these associations, but in Mesopotamia, we only see the evidence in the omens that they were dealing with these or creating these ideas in their heads when they were thinking about kind of more complex astrology.

CB: Right. And sometimes you see the Sun, Moon, and Venus put on they’re called boundary stones —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — from the same time period, right?

MWM: Yeah. So these are Kassite kudurrus or some people like to call them entitlement stele. These are often made of diorite, which is a really hard black stone. These are objects that are then inscribed with usually like, land grants from the king and stuff to people. But usually the top couple registers of the object have all the various gods but often celestial things, usually Sun, Moon, and Venus, inscribed on them as well as parties to this, right, agreement between a landowner and the king or something like that. And these exist during the Kassite period, so second half of the second millennium BCE around the time when Enuma Anu Enlil probably is kicking off, right, when things are starting to be written for this later canonical omen series.

CB: Got it. And the Sun, Moon, and Venus are the three brightest celestial bodies in the night sky, because Venus is very bright.

MWM: Yeah.

CB: Especially in certain phases when it gets far away from the Sun. And there’s evidence, though, going back possibly earlier in terms of Venus starting to have some astrological importance, and one of the things I had talked about in a previous episode was the synodic cycle of Venus and its relationship with the Sun maybe be keyed in to certain myths like the myth of the descent of Inanna.

MWM: Yeah. So this is, just to give some background, right, the descent of Ishtar or Inanna exists both in Sumerian and Akkadian versions, and it’s about the goddess – also the planet, right, if we make this association, which they certainly did to some degree – going down to the underworld. And when she goes down to the underworld, she disappears from the world, right? She’s no longer in the overworld or in the sky and down in the underworld, she – in the Akkadian version, she had one, both versions she’s imprisoned by her sister Ereshkigal who’s the goddess of the underworld, and then through some machinations is able to return, right? And so this dying and basically reborn god is a very common mythological trope, but if you make this associate with Venus, it also matches our experience of seeing Venus in the night sky on one horizon and then on the other horizon with a period of invisibility in between. And with Venus, when Venus goes away or when Ishtar goes away, kind of all fecundity, all procreation of the world stops, right? This is also another common trope in these types of myths. But you know, animals no longer procreate, the crops won’t grow. Even the kind of funny thing in the Akkadian descent of Ishtar is like, you know, young men and women in the street no longer like, flirt with each other and date and eventually like, have sex, right? Like, that stops because Ishtar has disappeared. So you see this common trope of the disappearance of the god – also the planet – modeling a real celestial occurrence but also adding meaning for society at the same time.

CB: Right. Okay. So yeah, so that seems important. And then all of that gets wrapped into this omen series, the Enuma Anu Enlil, which then from 1500 forward is passed on all the way until like, the last few centuries BCE until like, the third or second or first century —

MWM: Yeah! So we often call it, we just abbreviate it EAE, right? Enuma Anu Enlil. Yeah, it’s copied all the way down to the end. There’s an interesting thing that kind of happens in Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamian scribes are very conservative in how they preserve texts. And so they don’t throw anything away. So EAE is a certain type of celestial divination. Later on, there are other forms of celestial divination which we can talk about. But they copy EAE all the way down to the end, right? Cuneiform probably dies out around year zero, really. Maybe it goes into the first century CE. You know, it’s kind of hard to date at that time. But EAE is copied all the way down to the end, even though it may not be operational so much at the end. Certainly we can talk about the context of scholarship in late Babylonian culture later. But at that point, the kings – well, there are no Mesopotamian kings anymore. There’s now Persian kings or Greek kings and certainly later, you know, Roman emperors and things like that who are no longer… They don’t have the same buy-in with Mesopotamian divination, right? They’re not part of that culture, and so the role of these highly specialized scribes and diviners and astrologers kind of falls away. But they’re still copying these texts all the way to the end, right? They still wanna preserve this culture.

CB: Right. So in terms of the EAE, it seems like its impact on that type of astrology culminates around the 7th century BCE under the Neo-Assyrian empire where you have these astrologers working at a very high level in society and who are working for the kings directly and where the kings are actively seeking the counsel of the astrologers on an almost daily basis.

MWM: Yeah, very much so. So I briefly mentioned this before, but during the Neo-Assyrian period, Neo-Assyrian empire is probably, you know, it is the largest empire of its time. Hugely impactful for, you know, history, the history of the Middle East, the geography of the Middle East, et cetera. You know, they sack tons of cities, destroy tons of cities, build other ones. They deport people all over the Middle East, mixing populations for all sorts of reasons and things. You know, really impactful, very powerful empire, you know, in grand history terms. But for our purposes, it’s important to note that in the very highest echelons, like, the corridors of power in the Neo-Assyrian palaces, these are like, you know, kings who had unlimited power and unlimited wealth. They relied very heavily on their court scholars, right? And their court scholars had a variety of specializations, but many of them were astrologers. So astrology plays this incredibly important role, especially in what we call the Sargonid period, so Sargon the Great, Sargon the Second onwards, and especially under Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal. So in the palaces of the Neo-Assyrian empire at that time, there was a group of scholars who were employed directly by the king. I mentioned the scholar applying and sending in his resume, right; these were very coveted positions, usually passed from father to son over generations. These were scholars who studied extremely hard. They went to school; they went through much higher levels of schooling than other scribes did in order to learn all these omen texts like EAE and others. They learned at this time during the Neo-Assyrian period early forms of celestial prediction, right? So simple synodic cycles and stuff like that they could use to predict, you know, coming planets and coming eclipses and things like that. And then they – we have recorded, again, just because the vagaries of history, right, we have all of the letters – I wouldn’t say all, but we have a huge number, thousands of letters that these scholars wrote to the king. So we don’t have the response from the king to the scholar, but we often have what the kings had quoted in their letters. And he’s asking them all sorts of questions, right? He’s asking them all sorts of questions of state, questions of personal behavior. Sennacherib is really concerned about succession, because well, he gets killed, so Esarhaddon is even more concerned with succession, right, and trying to figure out who’s the right choice for an heir to succeed him on the throne. These are the questions he asks of his scribes and astrologers. They ask questions about who to give certain positions in government; they ask questions about where to campaign, right? So every aspect of how the government is operating at this time is being funneled through this court of advisors. At the same time, there are astrologers who are kind of spaced across as well as – astrologers and diviners – who are spaced across the empire who are watching for things. So they send in reports, and we have these reports preserved where they say they saw something, right? They may have seen a two-headed, you know, a pig give birth to a two-headed what’s a baby pig called? Piglet or something —

CB: Piglet.

MWM: Right? Yeah. So like, some auspicious thing they’ll see. But they also report on astrological occurrences that they witness all over the empire, right? So they’ll say I saw this thing happen in the sky, and then they’ll quote – what’s really fascinating is they’ll quote the relevant omen from EAE to the king. And that’s part of their system of reporting is they say I saw this thing, here’s the quote from the handbook that we have all memorized and we all know really well. And then they send that report on to the king. And then the king assembles all this information. And we even see stuff happening within the court where the king will ask multiple scholars the same type of question, right, because he wants to get confirmation from other people.

We have really amusing texts where, you know, very high-ranking scholars will say I heard that this other junior scholar told you that Venus was visible in the night sky, and this is what it means, and the English translation of it says, you know, he’s just an ignoramus. Venus isn’t visible for another month! Right? Like, don’t trust that guy at all! Right? So they get into big disagreements. So you can imagine this like, you know, network of people who are really dependent on the king all kind of fighting to get the attention, to give the best advice, to watch out for things. But also like, checking each other, and that’s where the king, you know, can trust it a little bit because he knows that all these people are kind of watching all the other scholars to make sure that they’re, you know, they’re giving him the best information, et cetera.

There’s also some interesting relationships between the king and these scholars. There’s one case where it’s pretty likely that this one scholar, Belasi, who’s a very erudite, very well-studied scholar of the Neo-Assyrian period, he writes to the kings all the time. He was probably the tutor of Ashurbanipal, right? So actually probably taught Ashurbanipal as a prince how to read and write, because we have some evidence of that. And the letters between Belasi and the king are fascinating, because Belasi really takes some liberties, right? You might think that talking to the most powerful person in the world, you would be very meek, et cetera, and Belasi tells Ashurbanipal all sorts of things that you would never tell a king, including things like, you know, get over it, right? Like, stop worrying about that. Or one example is that there’s like, the king’s really concerned about this report of I think it’s lightning; I can’t remember the exact thing that he sees, right, but someone sent him a report about lightning —

CB: Yeah.

MWM: — in a city, and what it might mean. And his advisor – it might be Belasi or it might be someone else who’s high up – says like, you shouldn’t worry about that. That only concerns this other place; stop trying to worry about things that don’t concern you, right?

CB: Right. Because the lightning struck another city, and the scholar —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — is like, it didn’t strike here, and it only matters —

MWM: Right.

CB: — if the lightning struck here in Babylon.

MWM: Yeah, exactly! Or in this case, Nineveh, yeah. But there’s another example where like, the king is feeling kind of sick. He had a cold, and these scholars tell him to just, you know, it’s fine; everyone gets colds. You’ll be fine; we don’t need to do all these, you know, fancy rituals. You’re gonna get over your cold pretty soon, or something. So —

CB: Right.

MWM: — studying, like, and these texts were all published really well. So Herrman Hunger, who’s an Austrian scholar of this material, published I think it’s in the State Archives of Assyrian volume eight, which is all the astrological reports to the king. These are now available online as well, I should mention. So there’s a really cool project called ORACC, Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus. I’d be happy to share the link with you. You can now access English translations of all of these letters that were sent by the scholars to the Neo-Assyrian kings and many other, I should say, cuneiform texts in English translation. So it’s really opened up all this material for people to read for themselves. They’re fascinating things.

CB: Yeah, it’s a great resource because it also contains summaries of each of the tablets, either the letters that the reports, so you can scan through it and like, see —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — interesting ones even if you don’t want to read the entire corpus. But it’s amazing how much of this survived because basically the library, the royal library was discovered and those tablets therefore were preserved and then translated in modern times.

MWM: Yeah. So these all come from – well, primarily they come from the city of Nineveh, right, which is in modern terms it’s within the modern city of Mosul in Northern Iraq. If you look on, you know, Google Maps or something, you can see the outline of the city now in Mosul, in the kind of Kurdish region of Iraq. And so this was the last capital of the Assyrian empire, and so it was destroyed by the Babylonians and Medes in about 612 BCE. And in this destruction, it buried all of these tablets in the palaces. And then in the mid-19th century, this British kind of explorer, archeologist Austen Henry Layard, ended up excavating Nineveh and found all these tablets still in their original context. Unfortunately, his method of recording information wasn’t that great, so we don’t have – people have tried to do a lot of work to reconstruct, you know, which tablets were from where, maybe which rooms they were from in the palaces. It’s hard. We have a general idea, but not a perfect idea. But this is where we get this idea called the Library of Ashurbanipal, which is an idea – this corpus of material that comes out of the Assyrian – well, comes out of Nineveh, right, comes out of the Assyrian capital. It probably wasn’t an actual library, per se; it’s more likely it was a like, a system of archives in the palace complexes, right, so you would have an archive of correspondence, right? An archive of correspondence with other kings, an archive of correspondence with provincial governors. And then you would have scholarly archives dedicated to different disciplines and things like that. But it is an immense trove of material, and most of it now is in the British Museum in London.

So when I do, you know, my own research for my scholarly work, I often – in fact, this summer I’m going to the British Museum to look at tablets. And they have this beautiful room where all the tablets are stored and you can request tablets and sit at these tables and read these ancient texts and try to translate them. And there’s a lot left. I mean, so this is something else that’s really fascinating about cuneiform is there are so many cuneiform tablets that have never been looked at, right? Never been looked at by specialists, never been translated. There are things, I think, that we often assume that these like, dry, dusty things that we look at in museums are dead and that’s it, and we have what we have, and you can read about them, et cetera. But you know, with many ancient cultures, but certainly with Mesopotamia, there is new stuff being discovered all the time. So not just new interpretations of ancient texts, but literally new texts being found. I mean, one thing that’s not related to astrology, per se, but for instance, the Epic of Gilgamesh – fascinating story, very readable, very relevant, all about kind of anxiety over death and memory and things like this – really great story. We’re still finding new pieces, even in the last decade, right? There are new pieces of Gilgamesh coming out of the ground in Iraq by archeologists and also unfortunately by looters that are filling in longstanding gaps in the narrative, right? So there are things that we’re finding in museum collections and in archeology that are new texts. Some of the stuff I did for my dissertation was texts that had never been translated before, never been seen, never been, you know, published or anything. And I was able to find them in the British Museum because there’s just a lot of stuff there for people to see. And there’s just, I mean, as a personal thing, there’s just not enough people to do this, right? There’s very few of us who have the skills to read these texts. But the kind of stuff we’re finding is really fascinating.

CB: Yeah. Well, because cuneiform was only deciphered in like, the 19th century, so that wasn’t that long ago in like, the long span of things. So there’s been —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — over a century, century and a half of people working on this stuff. But especially astrology is an even smaller subset of people working on that specific subset of cuneiform studies so that even with astrology over the past 10 years, there’s been things that have been discovered that have changed what we know about what techniques the Mesopotamian astrologers used that we didn’t know. Like for example the paper published on the terms or the bounds, which was thought —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — to be a Hellenistic technique, but then all of a sudden, it’s in a cuneiform source that then rewrites our understanding of the history of astrology with respect to that technique. Or more recently a paper was published where they discovered that the quadruplicities and by extension the square aspect was discovered in a cuneiform text, which then again like, significantly reframes what we know about the history of astrology.

MWM: Yeah. So I mean, you mentioned like, it’s a small group of people. Like, I know all the people who work on this material. We’re a very —

CB: Okay!

MWM: — small group! And yeah, as you say, it kind of kicks off in the 20th century. So it’s really, it’s a kind of fascinating history of the scholarship itself. Otto Neugebauer is one of the kind of big figures in this. So to give it a little bit of my own educational background, right, I did my PhD at Brown University studying with John Steele who’s at Brown who’s a history of what he says the Exact Sciences, so history of astronomy, primarily from Mesopotamia but he does other areas as well. And Brown actually has a long history of doing this type of work. So in the kind of mid to early 20th century, they brought over Otto Neugebauer from Germany kind of as a post-World War Two or just before type thing, and Neugebauer and Abraham Sachs and others at Brown really developed this whole school of thinking about the history of astronomy. Neugebauer had done some of this work in Germany before. But these early texts were found, were identified by scholars who were interested in the history of astronomy and noticed that some of these cuneiform texts were covered in numbers. So numbers in cuneiform are really easy to read; it’s a very simple system – sexagesimal for the most part, especially when you’re dealing with astronomy. And Neugebauer and others, Kugler and other people and Epping in the early 20th century found these tablets covered in numbers. They very quickly translated them. In fact, they published them just as numbers, not as tablets; they were just published tables of numbers. And these numbers showed a very complex – and this is, you know, this is late, late stuff which we can talk about the social and cultural context later, but very late forms of mathematical astronomy. And so they were super interested in how these mathematical systems worked, because here you had all this evidence of the numbers, the ephemerides, they’re called, right? The things that happened. And where they happened, when they happen, et cetera.

And so Neugebauer and Sachs and others started studying these more and publishing a lot more of this stuff based at Brown, which was really interesting, and hiring David Pingree who was this really eminent historian of astrology and astronomy across so many disciplines. I mean, he did —

CB: Yeah.

MWM: — Greece and Rome and the Arabic world and the Indian world and China and Mesopotamia, a little bit of Egypt as well. Yeah.

CB: He’s the most famous historian of astrology ever.

MWM: Yeah. I mean, he was phenomenal, right? And he kind of, he really led the Brown school and its later school of exact sciences in its later phases. He unfortunately passed away, and then it was kind of reinvigorated with the hiring of John Steele, and then he has since trained other students, myself included.

So when I came into that, like, I had done my undergraduate work actually in the UK at a place called the School of Oriental and African Studies where I studied literally just Akkadian and Sumerian and Hittite in cuneiform, right? The English higher education system, you apply to a program rather than a school. So for whatever reason as a young 18-year-old, I applied to do the ancient near east, and so I’d got a very deep training in the languages, which was really unique. You know, I think I lost out on some other stuff. You know, I never did like, gen ed type things that I think could have been beneficial. But I learned my languages really well, and I learned my history and archeology. But on a broader scale. And so then when I went to Brown for my PhD and learning under John, you know, I naturally then shifted my focus – or not shifted, but kind of narrowed my focus to the history of astronomy and astrology.

CB: So that wasn’t your intention from the beginning? You just sort of like, ended up heading in that direction in some way?

MWM: Yeah. Because very often, that’s how kind of PhDs work; you follow in some way what your supervisor is specializing in. I have a real interest – I mean, I just love Mesopotamia and Mesopotamian history and writing, but I have a real interest in scholarship and how scholars work and the knowledge they produce and how that knowledge is situated. You know, as should have been obvious already. Like, questions of science and religion and categorization and how people can conceive the world around them. And so astrology is like, a perfect fit for that, right, because it encapsulates so many of these things that I really find fascinating.

But to the wider field, I mean, there’s, you know, a handful of people around the world who really publish regularly on this type of material. It’s pretty small. There’s some more people in Germany now. I have a colleague, Mathieu Ossendrijver, who has published a lot on procedural texts – a really complex mathematical astronomy. But he’s also done some stuff on astrological significance and the scribes themselves and working in the late period. He actually leads a project now at the Freie Universitat in Berlin on the zodiac, right? History of the zodiac. He’s got a really cool project there, and is training students and hiring post-docs and stuff like that.

So there is more work happening. But it is a very small field; it’s always been just, you know, a handful of people through the generations who have been working on this type of material.

CB: So this is something where people, if they wanted to, they could go and study this in a university setting, study cuneiform and the related things, and then there would be, you know, work to be done if people wanted to take part in that process?

MWM: Very much so, yeah. Yeah. So there’s still many texts that have not been published, have not been looked at. I mean, I should say a lot of this material, you know, especially for astrological stuff, you know, people have like, glanced at it, and there’s like, these like kind of unofficial spreadsheets that we pass around of interesting tablets that someone should look at at some point. But none of us have enough time, right? And so it’s an easy way to kind of like, pick something and be like, okay, well, you know, I’m gonna go to the British Museum; I’m gonna, you know, pull this tablet out and have a look at it and you know, see if it’s relevant for helping. And as you said, right, new stuff – you know, new articles are being published all the time because someone picked up a tablet again and reread something and realized that, you know, what’s on it is actually pretty important. And also to that point of like, figuring out that like, quadruplicities or various systems of association, this is again another instance of this thing where we often find examples of later concepts in astrology happening in Mesopotamian texts; they’re just not necessarily explicitly mentioned, right? So systems of four are found very early in Mesopotamian divination, right, the association of eclipses and certain segments of the sky with places on the ground, et cetera. But it’s only later on and especially in other cultures that like, this is defined theoretically, right? We see the evidence of the omens in Mesopotamia, but it takes other cultures to actually define that type of theory.

CB: Got it. That makes sense. All right, so let’s redirect back to where we left off with the Neo-Assyrian periods, the astrologers working intensely with the kings. This is a type of mundane astrology that applies to groups of people like cities and nations, not to individuals —

MWM: Yep.

CB: — although the king, it does apply to. And as a result of that, one of the things you mentioned earlier in passing is that sometimes there would – when a negative astrological omen occurred, there would be certain rituals that they would do in order to attempt to avert whatever negative omen was indicated.

MWM: Yeah. So we call these namburbi rituals. They’re very well-known for eclipse, you know, for eclipse occurrences, but they can be used for other things as well. And these are pretty complex rituals. And one model that we have for, you know, of course there’s like, natural human curiosity to improve our ability to observe and predict events around us. This is not surprising. But one model we have for the impetus to really get this stuff really right is that in order to do the correct ritual to avert the evil of an eclipse, you actually have to get a lot of stuff ready. Right? Like, there’s a logical aspect to averting a potentially really catastrophic event, right, and the more work you can do, the better you are prepared. So one model for the improvement of these predictive capacities of Mesopotamian astronomy – again, this is not a division that they cared about, right, but if we wanna talk about, right – so one model for predicting appearance of planets and eclipses and stuff like that is actually to know how far in advance you need to prepare for the namburbi. Like, you know, you gotta get your unblemished cattle and goats ready. You gotta collect enough material to do the correct ritual. And so that might be one reason they get better at the predictive science is in order to get ready for these auspicious events that they know are going to occur because their predictive models are very good.

CB: Right. So if you develop the idea that sometimes when eclipses happen, that a king could die in the worst case scenario —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — that gives you a real impetus and a pressure to develop a mathematical or a predictive astronomy that can anticipate and tell you when the next eclipse happens that’s gonna fit the criteria that you’re looking for.

MWM: Yeah. Right. And then it’s gonna let you know that I have two months to prepare to do the ritual to make sure the king doesn’t die, right? And so that’s what we kind of see. And even in the letters to the Assyrian kings, right, they talk a little bit about this, about getting ready for things. So they’re very aware of what is happening and what will happen in the sky and what it means.

That’s not to say it loses its significance, because it doesn’t lose its significance at all. It just gives them time to get ready.

CB: I mean, I know there’s arguments about it, but it seems to me that astrology becomes one of the motivating factors then for the development of a complex mathematical astronomy is the practical uses and reasons why they’re paying attention to celestial movements and trying to anticipate them in the first place so that there’s this reciprocal – obviously, they’re undifferentiated with astronomy and astrology —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — but to the extent that we differentiate them now, astrology was part of the motivation for the development of astronomy.

MWM: Yeah. So during the Neo-Assyrian period, they have kind of rudimentary predictive methods. They can predict the appearance of planets and things like that. But by the late Babylonian period with the rise of mathematical astronomy, you get really, really strong predictive methods. Predictive methods that can predict the appearance of a planet in a position in the sky 300 years in the future, right? These like, incredibly precise models for celestial movement. And there it’s kind of interesting, because yeah, sure, they’re trying to get better at predicting things that are happening in the night sky and subsequently the significance of them, but they take it so far, right? Like, their methods get so good. So I kind of think that especially in the late period, the community of scholars gets smaller and smaller. They lose their state sponsorship. Now they are embedded in the temples, the big, very rich temples of southern Mesopotamia during this period, because the government now is something else; it’s Persian kings ruling from Persepolis or Greek kings ruling also from Mesopotamia but not Mesopotamians themselves.

And so these scribes now operate within the temple in these long, generational kind of positions in temple infrastructure. And I think they just become this like, very close knit group of scholars. Mathieu Ossendrijver has actually talked about this a little bit in some of his articles. And they just kind of get so obsessed with making their methods better and better and better. And one of the things I – just stepping back for a second to go to the idea of preservation in Mesopotamia of texts, that we’re lucky that they all wrote on clay, we’re also lucky because this actually gives us snapshots of where they were, how they were thinking and where they were at various times. Right? So not only do we have a lot of text preserved, but we have a lot of texts over time preserved, and this is really fundamental. So we can read early, early celestial astrology from the second millennium BCE, but we can also see the development of celestial astrology during the first millennium BCE because we have these texts buried at the time of their use. And then we dig them up and can read them and think about the gaps of time between them, right? So we actually have all the stages, which is really unique! For the Greco-Roman world, right, all this material that was written in the Greco-Roman world is received. It was copied again and again by people in new manuscripts, copied by monks, right? We don’t have the originals in their time and place. We only have what was recopied by later people because they thought it was important. That picture’s changing a little bit with places like Herculaneum, which is really fascinating. But for Mesopotamia, we have the texts in the ground from the time they were written throughout 3,000 years of history, right, so we can really think about how people’s knowledge of celestial prediction changed over time because we can read the text at each stage, which is really unique for a text culture.

CB: Right. You can see things getting increasingly more and more complex, both with the astronomy and the astrology. And you were mentioning the long-term periods, and one of the ones that develop in this period I think from the 7th century at least forward is the goal year periods, which were like —

MWM: Yep!

CB: — long-term planetary recurrences which I’ve been really interested in over the past year and getting really into. And this would – some of the longer ones, for example, was like, a 83-year recurrence of Jupiter where every like, 83 years on approximately the same day, Jupiter will station retrograde at like, roughly the same spot in the sky, for example. And they would start using this to calculate things and either very far in advance or very far in the past.

MWM: Yeah. So let’s talk about the late Babylonian period a little bit. Right, so I already mentioned the kind of context of these scribes in the temples. Incredibly highly skilled, very knowledgeable scribes both in astrology an astronomy, right – they’re doing these highly accurate predictive models but also really interesting astrology which we can get to in a second. This is where we get like, natal astrology and stuff like that.

So there’s this interesting three-part or three types of texts that all interact. These are the Astronomical Diaries which I’ve mentioned a little bit before, come up once or twice. These are the almanacs and the goal year texts. They all do slightly different things. We can start with the Diaries. So the Astronomical Diaries are – the term actually used in Akkadian, the emic term that they use to describe them – we call them “astronomical diaries,” but the term they used is “regular watching” – nasaru sha gine, right? So the regular watching of the sky. And these are texts that detail month by month and day by day everything that the observer saw. So they include all sorts of usually for the month, they’ll give the locations of the planets, if there’s eclipses, sometimes comets are seen, right? Everything that they might see in the night sky. There’s also really fascinating stuff about, again, back to this idea of data, right? Collecting data. So not only is it month by month, day by day, celestial occurrences; it’s also prices of commodities. How much barley costs that month. How much other things cost. It’s also river levels. What is the level of water in the Tigris and Euphrates at that time of the month, right? And it’s also historical events. So this is where we, for instance, the only contemporary record of Alexander the Great’s death comes from an Astronomical Diary. There’s a diary that records – it says, “The king of the world died. It was cloudy.” Right? Because they’re combining these observances together.

So if you think back to this idea of like, just collecting data, the Astronomical Diaries are the pinnacle of this. Just month by month, day by day, anything that’s happening, right, just write it down. And you can imagine this being used to compose new omens. Being a mine of information to connect historical events, to connect commodities, et cetera. It wasn’t only a mine of information for the Babylonians, right, because at this time, they’re creating these more complex mathematical schemes for predictive science, predicting planetary motion and stuff like that. They also wanna be able to predict river, commodity, you know, economic prices. They wanna be able to predict history, right? This is what they’re trying to collect data for. For modern scholars, these texts are also fascinating. So people look at – you know, you can chart the rise and fall of grain prices over hundreds of years thanks to diaries. And you can correlate that with historical events that we know are occurring at that time. So diaries —

CB: Right.

MWM: — are one piece – yeah, go ahead.

CB: So it brings an element of empiricism to it where —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — even if there’s arguments earlier on in the omen history about whether certain early omens were actually observed or whether they were just made up through a schematic or abstract notions. Like here we have the people that are watching the sky and recording what’s happening in the sky on a daily basis are also tracking like, the price of goods in the market; they’re tracking political events or other things happening in their environment. And it becomes, like, several texts refer to it or modern scholars refer to it as like, the longest running scientific program in history because —

MWM: Yeah!

CB: — it ran for something at least like, 500 years or something like that.

MWM: Yeah. It starts kind of 8th century, 7th century. There’s like, you know, they’re not perfectly preserved, right, so there’s a couple early examples. But then by, you know, 5th century, they are doing it nonstop, and they collect these into larger kind of compendia of diaries of observations. Yeah. It’s incredibly detailed, and it’s a huge source of information both for astronomy and for history.

CB: One of the cool ones is they record so many major historical events. You mentioned the death of Alexander. Another one is one of the diaries records Alexander’s victory at the Battle of Gaugamela, and they say that there was a lunar eclipse that occurred like, shortly —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — before that. And then the Persian king is defeated, and then that’s the end of essentially the Persian empire that had dominated in the area for the previous two centuries —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — and is the start of the Hellenistic era and the dominance of the Macedonians and the Greeks over that era. And you have this, you know, astrologer-astronomer who’s like, writing down, you know, what was happening —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — in the sky and on the earth like, at that time as he’s witnessing these events.

MWM: Yeah. And I love the – like, I mentioned already Alexander’s death, right, but I just, I love how mundane it is sometimes where it’s like, “The king of the world died. Cloudy.” Right? Like, just —

CB: Yeah!

MWM: — making these associations just in these texts. Because that’s what they’re trained to do! They’re trained to just watch and record. And also interpret, right? These are the same people who are writing other astrological texts and complex texts. But they’re just there to just watch everything around them, which is – again – what the texts are called. Right? Regular watching.

CB: At the end of that report, he says that Saturn was in Gemini and at the end of the month it had moved into Cancer and that Mars was in Virgo. I think that’s in the month that Alexander died, so it’s the cloudy thing, and that he couldn’t see what was happening in the sky that day. But then —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — that month he was noticing the broader whatever patterns as well.

MWM: Yeah, exactly. So I mentioned, right, they always record for the month what zodiac sign – so this is, you know, we can talk briefly about the invention of the zodiac in a bit, but this is the zodiac is now operational in astrology and astronomy. And so they record what sign a planet is in, and also if a planet is shifting between signs during the month. So that’s part of every observation includes that as well.

CB: Right. And the last point before we move on here is this is also like, an early form – as we’ve already said – essentially of like, financial astrology because then they did take some of these observations and rules and then apply them. I had found a quote by Francesca Rochberg that she used in an article where it was about Mars and Jupiter and about the prices of commodities going up or down depending on the status of Mars and Jupiter and like, brightness and latitude actually – that was what was interesting about it is it used latitude to indicate commodity prices in the market so that some of these —

MWM: Yeah, I think – I was —

CB: Go ahead.

MWM: — just gonna say I think this is a text published by Hermann Hunger. Yeah, it’s a late astrological text, and it relates the planets and zodiac signs to specific economic outcomes. So this is something we see developed during this time. It doesn’t exist earlier on, but it’s during this later period of astrology that we get new texts that start to combine other aspects of knowledge like economics with things that are happening in the sky. And this is probably, as you say, it’s probably a result of these scholars doing this work of recording observations, right? Like, it naturally pops into their head that, well, I’m recording commodity prices and I’m recording planetary positions. You know, there has to be significance there. And so they would write texts based on that.

CB: Right. Yeah. Okay, so that’s the diaries. And then we also get developing – you were gonna mention the ephemerides and —

MWM: Yeah, well, so the almanacs and the goal year texts.

CB: Almanacs.

MWM: Yeah.

CB: Okay.

MWM: So almanacs are another type of recording of celestial kind of occurrences, right? These are happening usually year by year. And you get both normal star alamacs, which are pre-zodiacal, and then you get almanacs, well, more or less proper, which are zodiacal almanacs where things are located using the zodiac. And then you also get these goal year texts as you already mentions, right? These texts that are looking forward to over a certain kind of usually a synodic period or something, right, that are then predicting future events.

So the three of these types of texts operate really interestingly. They often feed into each other. So as you mentioned, this idea of “cloudy,” right. So in the diaries, sometimes they’ll say something like, “nu pap” in Sumerian – so they still write in Sumerian at this time as well as Akkadian – which means like, they didn’t see, right? And so then they have to use predicted values. So the diaries actually include predicted values when it’s cloudy at night, because their predictive methods are pretty good or quite good at this point. And so they can use predicted events in the diaries as observations, and then these feed in as well to the almanacs and goal year texts, which also included predicted values, right. So all of these three types of texts are all feeding into each other and creating this very dense system of essentially data, right?

So this sets aside from – those three types of texts kind of operating together – is aside from the predictive methods. And these are the procedure texts that I mentioned my colleague Mathieu Ossendrijver, who’s now in Berlin – those are the things that he really studied. This is what Neugebauer and other people were interested in early in the 20th century. But these procedural texts are the really fascinating mathematical models for how planets move and where planets appear. And this is where, again, Ossendrijver published an article in – was it Science or Nature? I can’t remember. Might have been Nature. Where he talked about a kind of version of proto-calculus preserved on these texts.

So you have to imagine, right, from a geocentric system, so everything’s rotating around the earth. When you watch the movement of a planet, its velocity changes kind of like a syne wave, right? It goes up and down. You know, not counting for retrograde, but the change in velocity is constant and – or not constant, it’s variable, but it is always changing. And so to model this, you really need some pretty complex mathematics. And so it’s during this late time – so let’s say 4th century onwards – that they develop two major thing – they’re called System A and System B in the literature. One is a zigzag function, so continuous change over time that is kind of extrapolated into other formulae for modeling velocity, and then what’s called a step function where velocity operates in steps and they go between the steps. And again, they add more steps, and you can imagine this is a version of calculus where the more steps you add, the closer to a continuous change you get. And so this is what they’re doing in the very late period is they’re creating these really complex mathematical models. And even for the step functions, what they find is that – so the X-axis, they never graphed any of this, right? This all exists in lists of numbers, and we have to reconstruct it from that. When Neugebauer and others graphed this, the X-axis is actually degrees of the ecliptic. And the procedures are really fascinating, because they note that like, when a planet ends up in a certain unit of time going over a step – so from one velocity to another – the procedure tells you that you should actually average between the two steps to get an even closer approximation to the curve. They don’t talk about it in that sense, but what they’re doing is they’re getting you even closer to this kind of wave function in terms of how they calculate the change in velocity for planets. So it gets incredibly complex at the late period. Like, in high school, I stopped doing math in like, maybe I did pre-calc or something? I don’t even remember. But I found myself doing even more complex math in sexagesimal based notation in grad school because I was learning about these really complex Babylonian systems far beyond —

CB: Nice.

MWM: — my understanding of like, modern math at all.

CB: Right. Yeah. I love that. I love the way that it can bring you into things you never thought you would be focused on or interested in just —

MWM: Yeah!

CB: — to understand what’s going on. So one of the sort of quasi-models also that emerged in this period as well in the 5th century was the standardization of the zodiac into 12 signs of 30 —

MWM: Yep!

CB: — degrees each, right?

MWM: Yeah. So I referenced that briefly before. So you get – we didn’t really touch on Mul.Apin much. Mul.Apin is this two-tablet series, this – it kind of stands alongside EAE, the omen series that we talked about at some length. Mul.Apin is a standardized, two-tablet series that exists probably from a thousand BCE onwards. It’s actually found quite late, just like EAE is, although the methods contained within it are superseded by later mathematical models in Mesopotamia. But it’s kept around. It’s a really important text. And Mul.Apin is really – you can think of it as like, the foundational like, intro handbook to astronomy and astrology in Mesopotamia. This is what scholars would have learned. So this has lists of stars. Lists of constellations. This is pre-zodiacal. And the list of stars it gives us, it gives us their chronicle rising, gives us their culminations, all sorts of things – really fascinating information in it. Really useful for telling time; really useful for intercollation. Mesopotamia operated on a lunar calendar, and of course it falls out of sequence with the solar calendar, so they come up with systems of intercollation that increase in complexity, of course, as well.

CB: One of the interesting things about the Mul.Apin is it has the ziqpu stars, which help you to tell time at night, right?

MWM: Yeah. Yeah, so it tells you like, when they rise over your head at night. You know, and you can tell time at night with this method, because otherwise they’re telling time position of the Sun, but they also have water clocks as well. So Mul.Apin is just contains all of this really fascinating, useful astronomical and astrological knowledge. It also has omens in it as well – astrological omens – so it’s a really interesting, short but interesting, kind of like, handbook. It really is like a handbook of astronomy and astrology in Mesopotamia.

So —

CB: Those stars, really quickly – it’s when they cross the meridian. There’s a little – sometimes when I’m reading the literature, there’s some ambiguity between when the meridian is being discussed versus like, the zenith as a separate astronomical concept. And I’m sometimes not clear which is being referred to based on the translations. But with that, is it the meridian?

MWM: I think —

CB: Do you happen to know?

MWM: — with Mul.Apin – yeah, I don’t know off the top of my head. I think with Mul.Apin —

CB: Okay.

MWM: — it just says when they cross over – like, over you. Right? So you’re supposed to stand facing south, and when they cross —

CB: Okay.

MWM: — overhead, that’s when the time is signified or something.

CB: Got it. Okay.

MWM: But yeah —

CB: Interesting.

MWM: — it is… So I mean, this is just one of the difficulties with these texts is I talked about the complexity of the writing system. They’re writing in Akkadian, Sumerian. The later and later you go in this type of material, the more abbreviated the writing system becomes. So they just like, single signs for very complex topics. And often they can be interpreted in multiple ways. Obviously, the scholars who were writing these knew exactly what they were writing, and they, you know, in their own small communities they had conventions for how they did these types of things. But for scholars, it can be hard to get into exactly what is meant by a particular sign or a particular – so we’ve seen this with terms like “the door,” or the adanu, et cetera, which become very commonplace in the texts, and then it takes us a long time to unpack what is actually meant by that particular text, or by particular term in the text.

CB: Right. So —

MWM: So —

CB: — yeah, the Mul.Apin and then that takes us to the later forms – you were talking about essentially —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — how that establishes the path of the Moon and there were constellations passed through in the Mul.Apin, but then later the zodiacal signs become standardized?

MWM: Yeah. So this is what happens probably somewhere in the 5th or very early 4th century. It’s probably around when they take this list of normal stars – so we have this well-known list of about 17 normal stars that exist in Mul.Apin and other places, which are the ecliptic, right? And some of these are then turned into the zodiac, the signs of the zodiac, right? So then they create this division of the sky into bands of 30 degrees, and then this becomes essentially how astrology and astronomy functions from then on.

So they still talk about the constellations and stars in other places. As I said, they’re preserving EAE, they’re preserving Mul.Apin throughout. But the zodiac really takes off as the new way to do both astronomy and astrology, so the zodiac functions in mathematical astronomy; it’s really the cornerstone to mathematical astronomy. It also functions in the new forms of astrology that we get in the late period, and we can talk about those a little bit.

One of the reasons it takes off is because it makes math really easy. It’s hard to do math with arbitrary divisions of the sky and 17 constellations, right? It’s really difficult to make formulae that work well with this. But when you have 360 degrees and 12 divisions, doing the math of complex astronomy is much, much easier. And this is actually like, a legacy that we still have today, right? We can thank the Mesopotamians for the zodiac; we can thank them for 360 degrees; we can thank them for sexagesimal systems and how we count time. Like, you know, our watch has 12 hours and 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds; those are all kind of Mesopotamian concepts that still we use today. And there’s something that, you know, they work well because they are highly factorable, et cetera, right – they work well for math. And this is our leading supposition into why this was invented was to make things a little bit easier when they’re trying to calculate.

CB: Right, as a reference system.

MWM: Yep. Yeah.

CB: So the names of the signs of the zodiac are – there are a lot of similarities to the ones we know. But there’s also some differences in terms of just the standard naming terminology, right?

MWM: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, many of them are exactly the same. So Leo, Aries, Cancer, Pisces – many of them are, yeah, word-for-word copies.

CB: Well, and Aries is the one that’s a little different because it was referred to as the Hired Man early on, right?

MWM: Yeah, and then it becomes the Ram as well.

CB: Okay.

MWM: So this is one of the ones that changes its name, but it – yeah. And then the other one that’s kind of like that is Virgo. So Virgo —

CB: Right, so – go ahead.

MWM: Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, it is related to the plow, like Mul.Apin literally, and then this actually relates to some of the work that I’ve done myself. So my dissertation work was on this really late, astrological text which I find really fascinating, but it has images of the zodiac, and this is one of the reasons it’s well-known. And the image of Virgo is a woman holding a sheaf of barley. And so our understanding of the kind of transposition of the name Virgo over time is that it starts off as this agricultural sign – a sheaf, you know, a plow, barley, et cetera – and then turns into a figure of a female holding an implement or a crop.

CB: Got it. And the name is – the Furrow is the common name for Virgo, right?

MWM: Yeah. Exactly.

CB: Okay. And that refers to —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — like, the plow and like, dividing the land?

MWM: Yeah. And then another one that’s kind of like that is Pisces as well. So it’s the Swallows or the Fishes or the Tails, but you can see the association, right, with Pisces as well.

So I would say the one that’s kind of weird is Sagittarius. It’s kind of hard to understand where – and in many places that use the zodiac, it’s hard to understand the association to Sagittarius. But in Mesopotamia, it’s Pabilsag, so it’s this, you know, bowshooting person; images that we have of it, at least. But it’s unclear exactly where that imagery is coming from.

CB: Okay. All right, so we have the zodiac, and this is standardized. It doesn’t have all of the same qualities, let’s say, that might be associated with the zodiac today or a thousand years later. For example, like, they didn’t apply the elements of Greek philosophy —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — to this as far as we know at this time.

MWM: Yeah.

CB: But there were some associations with some of the signs already that would be familiar from later on. One of them is they may have already had a division into like, masculine versus feminine based on odd and even, I think, right?

MWM: Yeah, and generally positive and negative. There are some texts that also associate, you know, people – we’ll talk about natal astrology, but people born under certain signs having certain qualities, right? So that’s already kicking off. Another thing that we find in these early texts once the zodiac is invented is associations between zodiac signs and parts of the body. So it’s called —

CB: Right.

MWM: — the Zodiac Man in later traditions. We see that in Mesopotamian texts as well.

CB: That was another major discovery that was just in the past decade that —

MWM: Yeah!

CB: — that was published and that schematic association of starting with the head with the first sign of the zodiac, with Aries, and then going through each of the body parts until you get to the end to the feet.

MWM: Yeah. So that was my colleague John Wee who did a lot of that, yeah. So he’s worked on that. Yeah. So we’re finding – and this kind of goes back to this idea that once the zodiac is invented, suddenly these scholars start thinking of ways that they can use it, right? Thinking of associations that are productive for them, so that’s where you get the Zodiac Man; you get economics as we already talked about, right? And they start trying to like, put other things into this scheme that then allows them to create new ways of interpreting the way around them. So this is really the stuff that I worked on – these like, complex, astrological spreadsheets, these tables of data where they used this scheme that is also really interesting. We find in later cultures as well the micro-zodiac – the dodecatemoria, right? So in dividing a sign into 12 parts, and then creating meaning through that division.

CB: Right. So that’s the 12th Part, which is sometimes known in modern western astrology as the dwadasamsa from the Indian tradition. But this is known as 12 Parts in Hellenistic astrology. And so this divided the signs into segments of 12 or sometimes like, 13, right?

MWM: Yeah. So segments of 12 generally, and then you can think of the 13th as like, the Moon catching up to the Sun, right? So one model for division of 12 is a solar sign and a lunar sign, right, because the Moon goes through all the signs in the time it takes the Sun to go through one sign. But the Moon has to go through one more sign to catch up to the Sun at the end, so I think that’s sometimes where you get the 12 or 13.

And this is something that’s really – like, so it’s preserved in Mesopotamian texts post-zodiac. And we see it applied in different ways, and they start to do pairings of signs, right, so like, Aries-Pisces refers to the Pisces division of the sign Aries. Or a solar-lunar coupling is another way to think about it, right? We see this work its way into, again, other forms of astrology that have already existed. So they start using this new scheme of dividing the signs or modeling solar-lunar signs, and it’s being kind of almost like, folded into other forms of knowledge that have existed in astrology already. And that’s what I find really interesting. That’s one of the things that like, my research is most concerned with is how these forms of knowledge change in this late period. And I’m also particularly interested in how they visualize it, right? Like, so we have – I wrote an article a while ago on diagrams in astronomical and astrological texts because I’m really interested in the physical representation of this knowledge. You know, we don’t get these beautiful pictures of, you know, a perfect triplicity, et cetera, although we do have one or two circular diagrams. But how are they actually like, thinking of this knowledge and how is it operating for them? And how do they depict it?

One of the – this is a little bit of a tangent, but – one of the kind of historical scholars that I really find fascinating is a late medieval theologian named Ramon Llull, and so he’s operating in Spain I think 12th, 13th century. And he invents this idea of combinatorics, right, so this idea that he’s really interested in figuring out like, the true name of god, for instance, is what he’s concerned with. And so he thinks about taking like, all the letters of the alphabet in a circle, and then putting all the letters of the alphabet in another circle inside, and then again, right? And then like, rotating the circles to produce new combinations, and then he can interpret those and figure out if they’re meaningful. And I really feel like in Mesopotamia in the late period, post-zodiac, you have these scholars who are so highly skilled and so highly educated. And this is what they’re really interested in doing. They develop these incredibly complex methods for prediction, mathematics, and et cetera. They invent the zodiac; this way, you’re thinking about the night sky and dividing the night sky. And then they take all this heritage of amazing amounts of astronomical information and astrological information and omens and everything that they’ve known for thousands of years, and they just try to combine everything and see what works, right? They’re trying to create new methods for interpreting what’s going on around them. And so that’s where we get all these new types of text that flourished during this late period is this idea of like, thinking about a new scheme that they’ve come up with. Like, some cool new geometric triplicity or something. And then applying that to some form of astrology that has been practiced for a while and seeing how they can kind of fit these two things together. So it’s an incredibly creative time period, and you know, as you’ve already said, we see legacies of this in later cultures.

CB: Right. Yeah. It seems like throughout the history of astrology, once a new technique is developed, the astrologers then will try to take it to the fullest extent that they can in terms of elaborating on it and integrating it into other techniques and things like that.

One of the techniques – so as far as I know, the concept of the primary planetary rulerships of the later Hellenistic tradition of the domicile scheme of like, you know, Venus and Taurus and Mars and Scorpio and Jupiter and Sagittarius didn’t exist in the Mesopotamian tradition as far as we know at this point. But the system that did exist from earlier than this was the exaltation scheme, or the hypsoma scheme, which is known as the secret places or secret houses. And this is something —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — that there’s evidence for going back at least to the 7th century BCE. But by the time we get to this spot where the zodiac’s fully standardized, it seems like it really does become a system of associating certain planets with certain signs of the zodiac, like Saturn having its exaltation in Libra or the Sun in Aries or —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — Mercury in Virgo and so on and so forth.

MWM: Yeah. So this – we mentioned it briefly a while back, but what’s in Akkadian called the bit nisirti, right, so the house of – again, nisirti is actually the same word as the diaries, the nasaru sha gine, regular watching. So the bit – nisirti is the house of secrets or house of watching or something. But this is the place in which the planet is significant, most significant. So of course, always significant, but in a particular sign it’s most significant. And as you just mentioned, Sun in Aries, Moon in Taurus, et cetera. And what’s really cool is we actually see these – again, these texts that I worked on for my dissertation, they have these images of the zodiac, the ecliptic, and what we can see in them is it’s probably a continuous band of imagery, so probably the entire ecliptic was imagined. We only have preserved Taurus, Leo, Virgo, and that’s it. So we have three of these images preserved. But they represent a 30-degree band of the zodiac, of the ecliptic. And the bit nisirti, these hyposomata or whatever, are preserved in these images. So we actually have the planets in the image of the zodiac sign together, right? And they’re really fascinating because they give us this sense that this concept is now being visualized in a graphical form.

I should also mention it’s kind of cool – these images of the zodiac, you can find them online if you search for the dodecatemoria in Babylonian, or even if you search for zodiac signs they’ll pop up because these are our earliest images of zodiac signs.

CB: You don’t happen to have those images on you, by chance, do you?

MWM: Yeah, I do! I can pull them up. Let me just…

CB: Because – so these were tablets. And you told an anecdote in one of your lectures about how these tablets that have these drawings – because one of the things about it that you alluded to earlier is that drawings and diagrams are actually very rare when it comes to —

MWM: Yes!

CB: — cuneiform tablets. Like, they very rarely have illustrations or astrological diagrams on them with few exceptions. But these are – that’s what makes these tablets unique is they have an illustration of the zodiacal sign and then symbol or illustration of the planet in those signs that match the exaltations. But you told an anecdote about how there was a single tablet containing these, but that the people who found the tablet realized they could probably make more by selling them —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — as a separate tablet, so they broke it in half. So unfortunately, they’re broken in half, the one that we have.

MWM: Yeah, yeah. So this refers to a tablet that’s found – a single tablet, broken in half – found. One copy is in Germany, and one copy is in – sorry. One copy’s in Berlin, in Germany; one copy’s in Paris at the Louvre. And this is certainly a text that, yeah, existed as one tablet, and then was yeah. It was illegally looted and broken in half because the looters realized that tablets with images are very rare, and here was one tablet with two images, so why not make it two tablets, each with one image, and sell them separately? So it’s really too bad that they got split up. I actually – I’ve looked at both of these tablets in person. Like, gone to museums to research them. And when I was in the Louvre, I had the picture of the one in Berlin up on my laptop and I was holding the one in the Louvre in my hand, and I took a picture of the two of them together just so I could see, you know, how —

CB: Wow.

MWM: — it looked. But here, I can – do you want me to share my screen? I can share these. Yeah. So here’s – these are from Ernst Weidner’s publications of these objects. So what we’re looking at here, of course, is the Taurus tablet with the Moon featured very prominently in the middle, and the Pleiades on the left here. I think you can see my mouse cursor, right?

CB: Yeah, yeah.

MWM: Yeah. Interestingly, this also shows us what they imagined to be the Moon. Like, what they saw in the Moon, which was this figure fighting a lion.

CB: Wow. That’s brilliant. So yeah, and for those listening to the audio version, there’s like, a bull on the right, and then there’s the Moon – very detailed Moon illustration in the middle – and then seven stars of the Pleiades on the left.

MWM: Yep. And it’s actually labeled as well, right, so it says, “the stars,” which is the name of the Pleiades.

CB: Okay.

MWM: So the other one we have – just scrolling down – this is the Leo tablet, or I should say Leo side, because this is actually one side of two sides of a tablet, right? So very clearly here we have Leo standing on the back of Hydra, the constellation, so the snake constellation. And then over on the right, we have this would be – which planet would this be?

CB: It’s Jupiter.

MWM: Yeah.

CB: Because Jupiter – it like, it puts Jupiter technically in Leo, but it’s meant to be an illustration in between like, Cancer and Leo.

MWM: That’s right. Yeah. And then again, we have the labels of the constellations here of the, well, the zodiac sign of the constellation. And one of the really cool things – oh, here you can just see – these are the 12 divisions of the sign, right, re-labeled again so it starts with Leo-Leo and then so on. And then below —

CB: So the 12 parts, okay.

MWM: Yeah. The 12 parts. And then below this is all the information that I studied for my dissertation, which is all this other information that’s associated with these pairings of signs.

CB: And the other information is like, stones or medicines or —

MWM: Exactly. Yeah. It’s —

CB: Okay.

MWM: It’s medical ingredients you should use, presumably, under these pairings. And actually, we have another – we have one other text that tells us that this is how it was interpreted. It’s also omens that might be important. And it’s also daily advice. Like, “You should go to the law courts today. You should avoid leaks,” and things like that. So again, combinations of astrological information.

So the last one we have – this is the – do I have a picture of it here? Oh, it’s badly preserved. This is an old publication. But you’ll see it – so this is the Leo side of the tablet, and then here’s the Virgo side, and here’s the woman holding the sheaf of barley.

CB: I found an illustration of the Virgo one I can share if you want.

MWM: Yeah! Sure.

CB: So this is it, right?

MWM: Yep, that’s it! Yeah.

CB: So it’s like, a woman holding a sheaf of wheat on the right —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — and then there’s the star, which is labeled in the middle. And then over on —

MWM: That would be Mercury, I think.

CB: Yeah. So Mercury, which – do you know what it’s referred to here as Nabu or as, I don’t know if you can tell?

MWM: Yeah, no, here it’s referred to as “GU FOUR UD,” which is just the name of the planet.

CB: Got it, okay. Brilliant. Okay. So yeah, so that’s the exaltations. The exaltation – or what’s referred to later as the exaltations is really interesting. I was kind of skeptical for a long time about whether the exaltations were in the Mesopotamian tradition because of most of the evidence, like these tablets come from very late in the Mesopotamian tradition. And there’s these weird like, schematic connections within the exaltations and how it ties into other concepts like the domicile scheme in the Hellenistic tradition. So I was a bit skeptical of… I sort of realized that if those integrations were true, then it would have meant that – and the exaltations came from the Mesopotamian tradition – then they would have had to have built up a lot of the techniques and Hellenistic astrology around the exaltations, which seemed a little implausible to me at the time. But more and more evidence has come out, and it seems really clear that the exaltations did originate in the Mesopotamian tradition —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — and go back to like, at least the 7th century. And recently I saw in the new edition of the Mul.Apin by Steele and Hermann Hunger – they actually propose what I think is the first time I’ve ever seen this theory proposed, but it seems to be a really compelling theory for the origin of the exaltations where they said that they were originally associating the planets with the three paths in the sky that were set up since very early on in the Mesopotamian tradition which relate to like, north and south as well as —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — east and west, essentially. And I thought that was a fascinating theory that finally probably shows us where the exaltations come from in the early Mesopotamian tradition.

MWM: Yeah. So this would date, right, so this comes from Mul.Apin. Yeah, I should have mentioned – Mul.Apin gives these lists of stars, but it also places these stars in what they call “paths” of the sky. And as you said, these are divided into a northern path, a central path, and a southern path —

CB: So when you’re looking – maybe we should explain. So that when you’re —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — looking eastward at where the Sun rises each day, they divide that area of the sky into those three paths.

MWM: Yeah. So like, the left would be the northern, right ahead of you would be the central, and to the right would be the southern path. So the sky is divided into these bands, and stars are placed within these bands, of course, because they stay in the bands. And then the planets generally move in the central band but can shift outside at times. And this path structure becomes very integral to how astronomy and astrology are understood for a long time. I’d say the other big development is the zodiac later, but the path structure is really integral. And it starts in Mul.Apin.

CB: Right. And briefly, like, the theory is that Jupiter gets associated with what is roughly like, the summer solstice when the Sun is at its highest northernly I guess declination. Mars gets associated with the winter solstice roughly when the Sun is like, the furthest south. And then the other planets get associated with the signs clustering around either the spring equinox or the fall equinox, which are Aries and Libra.

MWM: Right. Yeah. That would seem to make a lot of sense. And it’s nice to see that coming from Mul.Apin because as I previously mentioned, Mul.Apin is so foundational to astronomy and astrology in Mesopotamia. Right? So it’s not surprising. I mean, Mul.Apin was published by actually Hunger and Pingree earlier in the last century, but then as you mentioned recently re-published by Steele and Hunger again. And so it’s not surprising that we’re seeing with more reinterpretation more of these kind of ideas coming out of these earlier texts. Because it’s likely that they do exist; it’s just, it takes us a while to be able to read them in that light.

CB: Yeah. Well, and it shows that people, you know, generations of scholars are understanding the texts more and more the more new texts are found but also sometimes old texts are revisited and deeper understandings of them are coming about as a result of just like, thinking about these things for a long time and seeing the big picture behind everything.

MWM: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And even just, you know, there’s also aspects to which modern methods of studying these texts have helped a lot, right? So thinking about, you know, back when Abraham Sachs and David Pingree certainly were first studying this, I mean, they had to read everything and memorize all these associations they may have found. Nowadays, you know, with projects like ORACC, right, you can go in and you can click on Jupiter and see every time Jupiter gets mentioned in any astrological text of a certain period. And right, so it becomes so much easier to access vaster, vast quantities of information in these corpora, in these archives than it ever was before. So this is really helping us do things like – so I actually have a research grant right now where I’m interested in kind of pulling out theoretical associations in astrology, right? So I hired a bunch of students this past semester to help me kind of code up these texts. But again, going back to this issue of like, finding theory, I wanna try to use kind of computer methods – so quantitative methods, you know, of association – to pull out the correlations that we find in omens, right? So figure out, you know, again, Jupiter and the king, or whatever planet, or a certain type of weather occurrence, how often does it occur with something happening in the apodosis of an omen, right? Can we find – can we basically recreate a theoretical handbook of Mesopotamian astrology by using vast quantities of information? So I had the students work on right now our spreadsheet of data is about 1,000 omens that they coded up for me, right? So that’s like, that’s sufficiently large; there’s many more we could do, but a thousand is a good place to start and I can start to play around with this using various quantitative methods to see if there are predictable ways in which their science works versus, you know, them just observing and writing down, or are they really thinking about a wider theory of planetary significance?

CB: Yeah. I mean, the exaltations, like, is really important because it starts to show a sort of schematization that’s – a systemization or yeah, no, schematization that’s happening from that point forward and how later, other concepts will get built around that in interesting ways that we can maybe go into, maybe not, but yeah. One of the things I meant to ask – I saw a reference last night to Tamara Green and her book on the city of Harran said that during the month – I think it was the third month, which is around the time of the summer solstice – that there was a Moon festival, a festival to the god Sin associated with the Moon, and that this was very common in Mesopotamia. Is that true? Or do you – are you aware of this? Is that a true, widely known thing, or —

MWM: I’m not aware of any particular festival to the Moon god in Mesopotamia. Things in Harran —

CB: Okay.

MWM: — are a little different than what’s going on in Mesopotamia proper.

CB: Okay.

MWM: There are regular festivals that occur throughout the year, so there’s like, a new year’s festival and things like that. But I’m not aware of one particularly for the Moon at that time. But that – I guess that would kind of align well with Taurus, right, which is where you might…

CB: Well, I was thinking – it depends on what month it coincides with, but she was saying —

MWM: Right.

CB: — that it was a festival that would have been around the time of the summer solstice, and I was just gonna say – I mean, that would be important because if that was true, that would be the only piece of evidence I’ve seen so far that could have indicated that the later domicile scheme could have had its origin in some conceptual or traditional structure that occurred in —

MWM: Oh right —

CB: — Mesopotamia already, because —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — the Moon later becomes associated with Cancer in the Hellenistic tradition, and that becomes —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — the starting point for assigning the rest of the planets to the signs of the zodiac.

MWM: Yeah. No, that’s interesting. Yeah. I don’t know of that association off the top of my head; I’m not super familiar with the ritual calendar of Harran. But it could be, yeah. I mean, there are certainly rituals that happen at certain times of the year. They also happen in certain cities that are associated with certain gods that have planetary significance, so it definitely could be. Yeah.

CB: Yeah. Well, that’s something I’m just working on for the domicile scheme. So all right, so let’s go back to and refocus something we keep almost getting into, which is the invention – the development of natal astrology and of birth —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — charts by the 5th century BCE is like, a huge turning point in the history of astrology.

MWM: Yeah, so this is tightly intertwined with the zodiac, right. And I think it also – I’ve spoken a couple of times about the change in societal and cultural locus of astronomy and astrology at this time, right – the movement away. So once the Achaemenides, once the Persians come in and remove the Neo-Babylonian kings, Mesopotamia is no longer ruled by Mesopotamians. It’s ruled by people from other places who don’t have the same kind of appreciation of Mesopotamian worldview and culture, although there’s a lot of similarity. So the scribes at this point are no longer – don’t have that close relationship with the king anymore, right, so they’re not providing this advice about the affairs of state and the, you know, livelihood of the king, et cetera. And so they have to kind of shift what they’re doing a little bit, and I think this is where we start to get more natal astrology, so the invention of the idea of astrology for people’s birth. And we see there’s some evidence of this early on as well. So there are texts, there are divinatory texts that talk about people’s – outcomes for people’s lives based on their appearance, right? So there’s this idea of focusing on the individual even before this period. But it’s in this later period they start to think about the places, the significance of planets and their locations in the sky when someone is born being meaningful for the rest of their life. So we start to get texts that really talk about this. Francesca Rochberg, who’s been mentioned a couple times, she published a book where she edited all of these – or when we say “edited,” meaning translated and published – all of these what she called Babylonian horoscopes. Right? It’s the text that deal with someone’s birth and what the configuration of planets means for their life. So it’s not the kind of daily horoscope that you find in your newspapers today, but it is really a horoscope based on the time of day and the day in which someone is born.

These are divided into two forms. One is an actual horoscope as we would think of it, so the significance – right – the interpretation —

CB: Birth chart.

MWM: Yeah. And then there’s also just ones that detail – like, there’s these very short texts that just detail when someone is born. And we understand those as being recorded and then used later by astrologers to calculate someone’s horoscope. So you don’t necessarily do it for a baby, right, you might record when a baby’s born and then later in life you might pay an astrologer to calculate their horoscope. And this interplays very tightly, right, with all the kind of complex mathematical stuff we were talking about because it’s only having access to that that allows an astrologer to create the horoscope for someone later in life.

CB: Right. This was an article you published on what you call birth notes, which is —

MWM: Yep.

CB: — it seems like it’s equivalent to like, a modern day birth certificate which —

MWM: Yep.

CB: — records the date but also the time of birth, which is interesting that they’re recording the time of birth at this stage in the Mesopotamian tradition.

MWM: Yeah. So as you mentioned, I published an article – it was actually in what we call in scholarship a Festschrift, so a celebratory writing book, for Francesca Rochberg. So she was an advisor on my PhD thesis. So I wrote —

CB: And she’s really like, the most like, eminent scholar of Mesopotamian astrology at this point.

MWM: Yes. Yeah, definitely. She wrote a great book called The Heavenly Writing, which people should read if they’re interested in this. Very accessible, very easy to get, to understand, et cetera. Yeah. She’s written a ton about this material.

So I published a short chapter in the book celebrating her where I just happened – again, this is how it kind of works – I was in the British Museum. One of the retired employees there who still comes in to do stuff said hey, you know, here’s a little tablet that no one’s ever looked at. You know, you should take a look at it. So I did. And it was a birth note. And it was a birth note for two girls, actually, who were born in the Achaemenid period. And what’s kind of funny about it, right – there’s no astrology on it, it’s just time, day, month, year of their birth as well as time of day as you’ve mentioned. And they were both born in the morning. So that’s all it has, but we understand it in its context as being recorded at that time and then later the family could hire an astrologer.

One kind of funny little – like, this is just about how history works, right? I didn’t do too much deep digging, but I’m pretty sure that this is our first mention of anyone’s birth. Like, birth time and day in history, right? So the first person in history who we know exactly when and where, contemporary record, of their birth. Which is – it’s a really odd first, right? We’re often obsessed with firsts when we think about history. Like, the first this, the first that. But the first, you know, first recorded birth is very kind of funny to think about, because people have been born, you know, for thousands and thousands – hundreds of thousands of years. Right?

CB: Right.

MWM: But this just happens to be when we have a record of someone’s birth.

CB: Right. And it’s in this period, because the two – one of the birth dates was for November 18th, 364 BCE, and it’s in this period like, right after the emergence of the earliest Babylonian birth charts which date to 410 BCE —

MWM: Yep.

CB: — so it’s like, you understand it in that broader context where people’s, the day and time that people are born is starting to have important significance to them as an omen of indications for what will happen in their future life.

MWM: Exactly. And in fact, we have a scholar of this period – his name’s Anu Belshinu – who wrote one of the texts I studied for my dissertation who, you know, some colleagues of mine have published about him quite a bit actually, because he’s relatively famous scholar from this period. It seems like – he’s incredibly well-read and well studied and wrote lots of important texts. It seems like he wrote his own horoscope. So we have a horoscope for Anu Belshinu that we think that he actually calculated later in life, right? So after he finished all his schooling, after he got really good at all this predictive astronomy but also the astrology side of things. You know, maybe one day he got a little curious and so then he calculated his own birth, you know, his own star chart for his birth and interpreted it, which is really kind of cool. And it’s fun to see a scholar from that period kind of do this own thing to themselves, right, and think about like, what does it mean for me, right? And it shows just the skill that he had that, you know, he had access to the types of methods and records that allowed him to think back to when he was born and calculate the locations of all the planets at that time. Which is like, it’s no easy feat, right? Like, he’s got some really complex texts at his disposal to do that.

CB: Yeah, absolutely. And that would be then the earliest instance of something that we started seeing show up a lot more frequently starting in the Greco-Roman period, which is like, astrologers calculating their own birth chart and astrologers like Vettius Valens or Hephaistio including their birth charts as well as their conception chart in their texts as case studies, because one of the things about astrologers is that they’re not just doing the practice of astrology as a profession but also they are oftentimes deeply interested in what their own birth chart says about their own life and fate as well.

MWM: Yeah. I mean, right, it shouldn’t surprise us too much if they’re operating within these materials, they’ve got to be curious, right? They’ve gotta wanna figure it out for themselves. And so you know, this is like, you know, this goes all the way back – clearly, at least to the Neo-Assyrian period, but the way in which these scholars are thinking about observing the world and recording these events, right, it also has impacts for them. And so it’s in their interest to do a really good job at it, and so it’s kind of like, putting your best foot forward to do your own birth chart and show how it works for you.

CB: Right. All right, so in this late period, we’ve said that – so astrology no longer has the state support that it had previously at the high point in the 7th century. Astrologers are operating in the temples. It seems like there was mention in the late period of two cities in particular that are still very active for astrologers, which are Babylonian and Uruk. Is that —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: Is that true?

MWM: Uruk, yeah.

CB: Uruk.

MWM: So Babylonian and Uruk are the main two cities. Borsippa as well, a little bit. So yeah, it’s very clear that these are the two kind of last bastions, especially Uruk, of cuneiform culture. So the last places in which scribes are writing cuneiform, reading cuneiform, training each other, operating in this kind of milieu of cuneiform scholarship that has a, you know, as I’ve said many times, has a very long legacy at this point. These scholars are working with a textual legacy that stretches back over 2,000 years, right?

You know, one way to think about it is this common historical analogy that Cleopatra’s closer to the Moon landing than the periods, right? So this is the same thing with these cuneiform scribes. They are closer to us than they were to the earliest cuneiform. Right? So they’re dealing with thousands of years of history, of written history. A real legacy of scholarship. They write this themselves. They at this time, you get – there’s a very well-known text that traces compositions, like known compositions like EAE and others, back to eponymous authors. So like, who might have written a text. And some of them are traced back to gods, right? They’d go all the way back, right? So these are scribes who are thinking about thousands of years of history, and they’re at the very tail end of cuneiform culture. It dies out within a couple hundred years after them.

But yeah, so they’re in the cities of Babylonian and the city of Uruk, a little bit in Borsippa as I’ve already mentioned. One kind of interesting thing that happens during this period is that we actually see – and this is something that John Steele has worked on, my former supervisor, quite a bit – is like, there are fundamental differences in how these texts are written in Babylonian and Uruk. The scribes in Uruk are much more likely to write colophons at the bottom of the text, so actually sign their texts, essentially. Whereas the scribes in Babylonian don’t do this. And so as a result, we have a really good sense of like, the social networks of these people in Uruk, whereas we have no idea in Babylonian, right? We can’t recreate these father-son, these apprenticeships, et cetera, whereas in Uruk we, as I’ve mentioned already, Mathieu Ossendrijver published this really amazing article where he does like, a whole not only family tree but also apprenticeship tree of the scribes of Uruk. Like, who they studied with, how they, you know, are related to each other. It’s really pretty amazing work.

CB: Right. So that gives rise to that there may be regional differences in —

MWM: Yep.

CB: — the astrology or different techniques that are being practiced or originating in different cities of especially either Babylonian or Uruk. And that’s interesting of the notion of just different maybe techniques coming out of different either schools of astrology or just locations where astrologers are practicing and developing things slightly differently.

MWM: Yeah. So we see this in the procedural texts, different types of procedures are found different places. We see this with like, normal star almanacs and almanacs. There’s, you know, different percentages found in different places. I see this with the text I studied for my dissertation, these really cool spreadsheets – the ones in Uruk are the ones that have the images at the top. So those are the only ones that have the images. The tablets – same series – that are found in Babylonian don’t have the images. They have just a little band of space much shorter, right, there’s no images at all. Just a little kind of like, empty space where the image could be. And in Babylonian and Uruk, too, the rows of the spreadsheet are inverted. So in one place, they’d go like, A-B-C, right? Row A, row B, row C. And in Babylonian, they go Row C, row B, row A. Exactly the same content, right? So the content has not changed at all, the actual contents of a cell. But they’ve completely inverted the layout, right? So there are these fundamental differences in how the scribes are working both in Babylonian and Uruk, which is, you know, it’s kind of surprising at times because this is such a tiny, close knit community. You know, not necessarily between the two cities, but there aren’t many of them left. You’d think they would wanna coalesce around a common tradition. But you know, maybe they just kind of siloed into their own schools and wanted to do things slightly differently.

CB: Yeah. I mean, and well sometimes just astrologers have different lineages, especially of teachers and sometimes certain teachers might want to emphasize certain techniques and other teachers might emphasize other techniques that they think work better or prefer. And especially in this case, if what we have is like, family lineages where —

MWM: Yep.

CB: — astrology’s being passed down from father to son for generations, there’s an even more of a personalization potentially with the types of techniques or approaches or conceptualizations that individual families or schools of astrologers would like, identify with even more strongly.

MWM: Yeah. I think that’s probably right, right? We do have this idea of a lineage; people trace themselves back to ancestors, especially again scribes in Uruk are the ones who leave us their colophons, their father, and so on. And they actually come from a family, so they trace it back to an eponymous ancestor who founded their family, right? Kind of historically or mythically or whatever. So that is certainly there’s a strong identity aspect there.

I guess the kind of strange thing, though, is that we do find these common methods, right, in both Babylonian and in Uruk at this time. So there is both this idea of a shared understanding of how things work, but then also specializations into certain techniques or methods. It’s really like, inhibited by the fact that in Babylonian, we don’t have these colophons; we can’t create these social networks. We don’t understand who was working with who. That makes it really hard to understand more of what’s going on. And this, I should say, like, this plays into another kind of major larger kind of meta-point about the recovery of cuneiform, which is when it’s looted out of sites, we lose all of its archeological context. We can’t say where it’s from, right? And one of the benefits for tablets from Uruk, a large percentage of them were excavated scientifically by German archeologists, and so we know exactly where they’re from. And that really helps us understand, you know, where these texts were created, where they were stored, where they were deposited. A bunch of these texts are deposited in the temple of Nabu, right, they’re like, the god of writing. So we know that they were prestigious objects that were then, you know, given over by the scribe to a certain god. So that helps us understand this context. In Babylonian, we just don’t have that level of detail, right, so we really struggle to understand the context in which these things were written – never mind dating, right? So if something’s excavated archeologically, we can be much more sure about the date of its not necessarily composition but the date of its deposition in the earth, which can get us somewhere.

CB: Is Nabu the patron god of Uruk? Or what’s – who’s the patron god of Uruk? What was the —

MWM: It’s Anu.

CB: Anu. Okay.

MWM: Yeah, it’s —

CB: So what was the Nabu temple you had just mentioned?

MWM: Yeah, it’s just, so temples of Nabu are not uncommon, because he was the god —

CB: Okay.

MWM: — of writing, and scribes, you know, funded these types of things, so there is a temple there as well.

CB: Got it. Okay. That kind of brings up something that goes back to something I got really interested in, which is the idea that some of this may have been perceived as like, revealed wisdom from ancient sages.

MWM: Yeah.

CB: And that this shows up in two really distinct places. One of them in potentially in the creation myth, the Enuma Elish —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — which is really important which we should talk about. But then it also starts showing up in the astrological tradition where it also gets attributed to this mythical sage. And I was, I guess I had come across this before, but I didn’t fully process it until I was preparing for this episode and the significance of this, because we have similar dynamics in the Hellenistic tradition, and I feel like there’s a linkage there. So I was hoping that’s something we could talk about just a little bit.

MWM: Yeah, definitely. So I’ll cover the second part just briefly. So there is this – I kind of already mentioned a little bit, but – there’s this text and catalog of authors and sages, and again, it takes these canonical forms of knowledge like Enuma Anu Enlil and others, and it traces their lineage back – and even things like Epic of Gilgamesh and other texts, right – traces their lineage back to a creator at some time, right? So sometimes these are human scribes living often at the end of the second millennium BCE during the Kassite period, and sometimes they are gods, right? So things come from Aya; Aya is the god of wisdom, and certain texts are attributed to Aya, right? So there is this connection.

The scribes of the late period are trying to think about where their knowledge comes from. And so they create these links back to much earlier periods.

CB: Maybe this would be a good time to talk about the Enuma Elish.

MWM: Yeah. So that was the kind of longer thing I wanted to address next was the Enuma Elish, which is the Babylonian creation myth. This is a, you know, incredibly important creation story for Mesopotamian worldview; it’s one of many. I mean, many cultures have kind of a pluralistic view of creation where there’s different ways the world is created.

So the Enuma Elish is one of these. It is the most common one in Mesopotamia, and as I mentioned early on in this episode, it really focuses on the city of Babylonian and the god Marduk. And so —

CB: Who later became associated with Jupiter?

MWM: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And in fact, there’s a whole cool section at the end of the Enuma Elish that we can talk about in a bit that talks more about these associations. So the Enuma Elish is the story of creation. It begins with the creation of the world. And then at some point, there’s this huge battle between Tiamat, who’s this monstrous female goddess, and her army of kind of monstrous creations, and the other gods. And they all fail and eventually Marduk is selected among the gods to fight Tiamat, and he wins through this really elaborate battle. And then he’s crowned king of all the gods. And as part of this as well, there is a important astronomical, astrological section that involves the setting out of the way the world works, the way the night sky works. I should say just the way the sky works. And this is often pointed at as some early astrological and astronomical knowledge embedded in myth. And you know, going back to a common theme, it really shows how impossible it is to disentangle these things from each other, right, because even in this high myth of – this story was read out during rituals, during important segments of the year, right. You have embedded in this some really interesting astronomical knowledge about like, phases of the Moon, right, are in this myth, right? Like, the knowledge of this. And scholars who have studied this have said that, like, for its period to some degree, this doesn’t represent the kind of pinnacle of astronomical knowledge of the period, but it represents a common level of astronomical knowledge, which is really kind of useful to know, right, that people hearing this would not be like, wow, I didn’t know that’s where these things came from. But they would say like, yeah, that makes sense; like, I understand the cycles. I understand how things work, and now I know kind of where they’re coming from.

CB: And this dates to approximately like, 1,000 BCE or slightly before?

MWM: Yeah. So you know, the first kind of versions we have are from there. The earlier versions probably date to earlier than that, or at least the composition of it is probably dated to a little bit earlier. But this is —

CB: Okay.

MWM: — one of these kind of big, important texts that we get. And the Assyrians – so the Neo-Assyrian state, you know, kind of reuses this by splicing in Ashur for Marduk and stuff like that so people modify it a little bit, but it’s really a key text for creation but also for this idea of astronomical and astrological knowledge in myth.

CB: Okay. And one of the most relevant sections for astronomy and astrology, I was just gonna read it really quickly.

MWM: Yeah, go for it.

CB: It says, “He fashioned heavenly stations for the great gods, and he set up constellations, the patterns of the stars. He appointed the year, marked off the divisions, and set up three stars each for the 12 months. After he had organized the year, he established the heavenly station of Neberu to fix the stars’ intervals. That none should transgress or be slothful, he fixed the heavenly stations of Enlil and Ea with it. Gates he opened on both sides, and he put strong bolts on the left and the right.”

MWM: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. And this is the god Marduk who became associated with Jupiter, who’s doing this. And one of the things he says he estbalihsed the heavenly station of Neberu, which is a name for Jupiter, to fix the intervals of the stars. And there’s just some interesting things there that I realize are both relevant at the time but then also I think later astrologers probably interpreted it in certain ways and could have motivated certain techniques.

MWM: Yeah, that’s one section that people kind of struggle to understand a little bit from an interpretation standpoint is what he means about the stars’ intervals and Neberu and Jupiter. The other sections are a little bit easier, like the three stars each for the 12 months clearly relates to something we know as the astrolabe tradition in Mesopotamia, something that comes out of or is related to Mul.Apin, right, so the three stars each are the three paths. So stars on each path for each of the 12 months is a way to tell time. And it mentions that he organizes the year in that section.

But the fixing of the stars’ intervals is kind of interesting and really difficult. This is one of these places again where, you know, it could be in a decade or so someone finally figures out that like, well, the way this is said is found in another text, and if we bring these two texts together we can understand this in more context.

CB: I mean, I can explain part of it —

MWM: Yeah!

CB: The later tradition interpreted it as one of the things the myth says is that Jupiter/Marduk, that Tiamat was chaos or like, the undifferentiated world, and that Marduk cuts Tiamat in half and then —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — creates – half becomes the sky and half becomes the earth. But then this notion of Jupiter associating with Neberu, which means like, the crossing point —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: In the later Hellenistic tradition, you know, the birth chart of the world, which is similar to what we’re talking about here, the creation of the cosmos, had Cancer rising and Jupiter had its exaltation there in Cancer but also in the first house which is the Ascendant, which is the dividing point between the sky above and the earth below. So I don’t know if that conceptualization is at all being understood this early, like, at 1,000 BCE or whatever —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — but I absolutely could see how later astrologers could have used some of this as a motivating point for some of the conceptual constructs that they used with the Thema Mundi and how it related to the exaltations.

MWM: Yeah, that’s actually really interesting, especially with… I’m not sure if you’re aware of the Berossus tradition?

CB: Yeah, exactly.

MWM: Right. So Berossus is this, well, you know, maybe a Greek scholar, so operating in the Hellenistic period. He writes a text or at least he’s attributed to writing a text called The Babyloniaca, which is in the kind of genre – this happens during the Greek period – where people write texts about areas of the world. So there’s Parisica, there’s Egyptica, et cetera, right? So people are writing these kind of comprehensive encyclopedias of an area. They’re not really encyclopedias, right, but – so Berossus writes The Babyloniaca. It’s not preserved in its original form by any means. It’s always quoted or the quotes of it are quoted by someone else. There’s this really complex editorial. You know, it’s not like a cuneiform text where we dig it up and we can read what they actually wrote; we have to kind of read versions of it that are quoted by other people.

But one of the things Berossus does preserve is this story. Like, versions of the Enuma Elish are preserved in Berossus and therefore would have been accessed and available to Hellenistic scholars. So I like that idea; I think it’s really interesting. And I think, you know, maybe Berossus might be our link to this, right? Through by preserving this story of the creation of the world and, you know, to what fidelity Berossus preserved the Enuma Elish we don’t know, but he certainly talks about the Battle of Tiamat and the splitting of Tiamat and stuff like that. So that would make a lot of sense.

CB: Yeah, exactly. And Berossus also… I mean, there’s several things with Berossus, but one of the other things I was – one of the fragments attributed to Berossus also talks about the destruction of the world in Cancer and Capricorn, which then also ties in with this conceptual construct of the Thema Mundi having Cancer rising at the birth of the world. But one of the other things I wanted to tie in is the Enuma Elish is said to be a revelation. I was reading a paper by a scholar named Philippe Talon who said that he points out that it’s said to be a revelation, and while it doesn’t give the name of the speaker, a couple times in it, somebody named “the First One” is mentioned. And he argues that this was probably later understood, or was understood, to be the original mythical sage named Adapa, who was somebody that the design of the cosmos was somehow first revealed to or first revealed it to humanity. But I think that’s something we should talk about, because then Adapa shows up because Berossus also then talks about Adapa and associates it with this myth of the Enuma Elish that he conveys. But then Adapa as a mythical sage also shows up in the Enuma Anu Enlil tradition where some parts, some versions of the Enuma Anu Enlil are also said to be have been revealed or associated with Adapa.

MWM: Yeah. So Adapa is a really important figure in even like, the Mesopotamians’ own conception of their own, the history of scholarship, the history of knowledge, right? Adapa is this mythical sage. There’s also another term for this, which is the Umanu, which are more actual humans, right, these are – the Umanu are the really skilled sages, the human scribes. But Adapa is like, the chief among these, and he’s closely associated with the god Aya Anke, again a god of wisdom but also a god of water and things like that. And Adapa and these kind of really skilled sages – in imagery when we see this type of person, they actually have like, a fish costume on, which is really fascinating. And this is their association with water. And this is like, the knowledge that comes from the underground, from the sweet water that like, rises up and things like that. So there’s this really complex network of associations with this kind of early sage, these mythical sages. And you find this in a wide variety of myths, right? So we also get myths about like, Aya helping Adapa with winds and things like this and this kind of skilled knowledge of stuff like that. So there are mythical foundations for all of these forms of knowledge that stretch way back to very early conceptions of Mesopotamian like historiography and myth. There’s a great quote about Gilgamesh. So The Epic of Gilgamesh – we’ve already talked briefly about it – but Andrew George who translated Gilgamesh, the Penguin edition that you can get pretty readily, he said that Gilgamesh lives on the threshold of history, right? That he lives in between history and myth. And a lot of what we read in Mesopotamia when we’re talking about Adapa or these like, stretching knowledge back to these time periods – it’s really at this threshold of time when, you know, it might be a real person for whom we have contemporary records, or it might be a myth, or it might be somewhere in between. Someone who is, you know, contemporarily known from texts but also takes on this mythical persona in much later times because we’re dealing with thousands of years of history, right? For someone at the end of Mesopotamian history, cuneiform history, who’s writing, someone this far back is, you know, 2,500 years before them, right? So they’re trying to think of how to conceptualize this long history.

CB: Right. Well, one of the things Berossus says is he says that Adapa taught humanity writing, but also “mathematics,” which in Greek in some instances in that time period actually meant astrology or —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — astronomy. So part of Berossus’ myth may have been that Adapa taught humanity astrology. And what’s really exciting about this to me is that in the early Hellenistic tradition, we have an exact parallel tradition because they very early on say that there was a mythical sage named Hermes Trismegistus who revealed the astrological wisdom and that some of the early astrological texts are attributed to. And I have to imagine that they must have been inspired by this earlier tradition that Berossus and other early astrologers with the Enuma Anu Enlil who are associating this astrological wisdom with this ancient sage, it’s like, there’s just an exact continuation of that in the next tradition in Egypt, in Greco-Roman Egypt from about —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — the second century onward.

MWM: Yeah. And it also gets at this really interesting idea of like, authorship and creation, right? Because you know, I mentioned these colophons that were at the end of tablets where scribes write down who wrote it, right, and the person’s lineage and stuff like that. But you know, there is this idea that like, you’re not the creator of the knowledge, right? The knowledge has been passed down. The knowledge comes from these mythical figures, right – Patapa and others. But you’re just the copyist, right? You’re copying down things.

There’s a couple rare cases where – well, it’s not even creation in this case. There’s a medical treatise, the diagnostic handbook, which is just how to diagnose, you know, ailments. And this – in the later period, this is attributed to one particular scholar. But even that, it’s not that he created it; it’s that he wove it together from twisted threads. Right? That’s the analogy that’s used, right? So the idea that this knowledge has existed, the knowledge was granted by the gods, granted by mythical figures, and it’s the scribes who were interpreting it and recopying it and constituting it in new forms later on in history throughout Mesopotamian history.

CB: Right, and that being part of that lineage that stretches back like you were saying like, 2,000 years when it came to some of the astrological texts, that was actually viewed as more important and more relevant, like, marking that you’re part of that lineage rather than having unique authorship of something like that, which would actually be viewed in some instances as having less weight to it because it doesn’t have the weight of the tradition.

MWM: Exactly. Yeah. So like, connecting this to a long tradition of scholarship back to a mythical founder is way more important than saying that you created something new, which is kind of – it plays back into this idea of the late period of these new creations of texts. So one of the things I already mentioned, like, you know, connection of a zodiac with economic forecasting, you know, the other types of interesting combinations of text – we only find these in single copies, right? It’s very rare like, that economic zodiac texts get, you know, it’s not copied again, right, because these don’t date back so far. They don’t have that same legacy. And so these experiments in astrology in the late period are kind of one-offs. Now, I mean, that being said, some of the theories are of course copied by later cultures. But we don’t find the same conservative need to preserve them that we do for traditional forms like Mul.Apin and EAE and other forms of knowledge that stretch back as you’ve already said to these mythical founding figures.

So there you can really see the importance of the legacy in the preservation of the text, right, because it dates way back and there is a need to repeat it and copy it again, whereas these new experiments in astrology, you know, someone comes up with a cool idea, they write it down, you know, and then maybe that’s a one-off.

CB: Right. Well, what was happening is that you entered the era of like, freelancers. It’s like, astrologers had institutional support, like, universities or something in the 7th century. But then let’s say by the time after – so in our chronology here, we’re in the period where Alexander the Great conquers Mesopotamia and Egypt in the late 4th century in like, 323 or 331 or whatever —

MWM: Yep.

CB: — it was.

MWM: Yeah.

CB: And then all of a sudden, most of the ancient world in terms of the Middle East and Northern Africa and Southern Europe or the Near East is under the control of Greek-speaking rulers, and Greek becomes a common language. All of a sudden, that brings Greek culture into much closer contact with Mesopotamian culture, and all of a sudden you start seeing the Mesopotamian astrologers interacting with Greeks, but also starting to freelance and either doing consultations and like, readings, or in some instances, evidently traveling to and like, immigrating to parts of Greece and settling there and starting to teach astrology, which is one of the legends that’s disputed with Berossus —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — that he wrote this, that he wrote a text on the history of Babylonia, of Mesopotamia, in Greek and then traveled and set up a school for astrology on the island of Kos, which has been viewed as suspect and still is by many of the scholarship today. But then in the 1980s, we just discovered an inscription from Larissa in Greece from central Greece basically where the city commemorated what they call a Chaldean astrologer who came and set up shop there. And they were like, commemorating him for his work on astrology basically in this inscription from like, the middle of the – from the second century BCE. So it shows that that was actually something that was happening and therefore while we don’t know about the legend of Berossus, but it gives greater credence that things like that —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — were taking place at least.

MWM: Yeah, definitely. And like, there’s a lot of mentions in Greco-Roman texts of Chaldeans and the Assyrians, right? They’re very well aware of this. And this is the other thing, you know, we can talk about a little bit briefly is that, like, you know, the direct borrowing of concepts – like, things like, so in Ptolemy, right, is borrowing data from Babylonia. Like, the mechanism of that borrowing is really hard to understand primarily because of the lack of direct textual references, textual witnesses in Greco-Roman culture. Right? We have much later copies of these texts; we don’t have the, you know, there’s no cuneiform from Ptolemy’s area or time period. But we can see the direct borrowing of certain concepts. So one thing is like, the length of the lunar synodic month, right? The Babylonians calculate this to an incredibly detailed level of precision, and Ptolemy borrows this like, outright. And then there’s other concepts that he’s borrowing from Mesopotamia. So tracing this borrowing, as you said, during the Hellenistic period, you know, suddenly Babylonia, Uruk, still inhabited by Mesopotamians still writing in cuneiform, are now suddenly in the same empire as people in Egypt, as people in the Aegean world, as people in Anatolia and Lydia and things like that. And so there’s this really – I mean, there must have been, and we have some evidence for this, but there must have been just a wide degree of cross-pollination in terms of astrology, right? And this is – obviously the zodiac travels, right, and that’s why we still have the zodiac. But other forms of theoretical astrology and other ideas in astrology and data, again, going back to this idea of the diaries and the amounts of eclipse records that Mesopotamians had recorded are traveling as well.

CB: Right. One of the birth charts has like, a Greek name on it – one of the Mesopotamian horoscopes is attributed to somebody that had a Greek name, right?

MWM: Yeah. So this is a practice that happens during the Hellenistic period or the Seleucid period, so under the Seleucid Empire in Mesopotamia. So certain – this may have been more widespread, we don’t know. I mean, it’s only preserved in text, so that’s the best evidence we have. But people take dual names. So they have both a Mesopotamian name and a Greek name, and so we get – there’s certainly Greeks living in Mesopotamia at this time, of course, but there’s also Mesopotamians, Babylonians or something, who take on Greek names as well. And I mean, it’s just becoming a multi-cultural, right? There’s just more and more people there, and so they use different names in different contexts.

And it’s also kind of funny, right, when we read – the very, very late texts that – I talked briefly about this issue of like, the abbreviated nature in which they write these texts. Just like, single signs standing in for very complex terms. You know, it’s highly likely that these people are speaking Greek maybe, most likely speaking Aramaic. They’re probably not speaking Akkadian anymore to each other, yet they’re still writing in Sumerian, which is even older and Akkadian, right? So they’re writing this incredibly esoteric, antique way of writing and language, and then they’re speaking other languages. So it does, it really begins to take on this if you can imagine like, a late 19th century, you know, scholar who writes all their stuff in Latin and Greek, but is speaking French and German or something in Western Europe. Like, that’s the kind of image you should think about someone is just like, so deep into these esoteric languages but conversing in multiple other languages.

CB: Right. That makes sense. And the astrology at this period in Greek and Roman culture in like, the 3rd and 2nd and 1st centuries BCE starts to explicitly become associated with the “Chaldeans.” And they’ll refer to like, Chaldean astrologers. And Chaldean was originally like, a geographical region in southern Mesopotamia and a specific ethnic group of people that moved to or immigrated to Mesopotamia in like, the 9th century or so, right?

MWM: Yeah. It’s an ethnonym, right, so it’s a certain type of people. But then, you know, for whatever reason, it starts to stand in during the Greco-Roman period for Babylonia. And this is why even later we talk about Ur of the Chaldees] as a term. So that, you know, they don’t necessarily say Babylonia; they say Chaldea. Again, Cicero talks a little bit about this as well; he talks about Chaldeans; he talks about Assyrians and their predictive methods, right? So they are aware, but the scholars have studied like, all these references in the Greco-Roman texts, and just there’s a little bit of corruption that happens in terms of how they understand both the location and time period. But they are very aware of the skills and the legacy.

CB: Well, and the Chaldeans as an ethnic group immigrated in like, the 9th century or somewhere around there BCE, but then eventually gained political power and eventually overthrew the Assyrians and like, set up a whole, like a dynasty for I think like, a century, right?

MWM: Yeah, the Neo-Babylonian dynasty is definitely I think what you’re thinking of there, and they’re the people who overthrow in alliance with the Medes who are a pre-Achaemenid Persian group. The Neo-Babylonians and the Medes get together and dominate the Assyrian empire and cause its downfall. And I think, yeah, I think they do trace themselves back to it in a separate ethnonym.

CB: One of the things that’s interesting about that dynasty is every single one of the kings of that dynasty is named in connection with a planet or in connection with one of the gods named after the planets. And it seems like that’s sporadic in the earlier ones, but for this one, it’s like, every single one of the I think six or seven kings or something like that, and I’m not sure if that’s making too much of that or if there’s something significant about that.

MWM: Yeah, so a lot of them have Nabu names, like Nebuchadnezzar, and then there’s a couple Marduks and there’s a Nergal as well. And I think, yeah, I mean, so at this period, the naming – these associations are just ever present. I mean, this is following on from the Neo-Assyrian period where astrology becomes so much more embedded in the state —

CB: Right.

MWM: — so it’s not surprising that this would be such an important aspect.

CB: Okay. So yeah, so then Uruk is in southern Mesopotamia, so it’s in that area which also would have been associated with that ethnic group at some point at least much earlier. So then you have different astrologers that were referred to as Chaldeans; they start defusing throughout southern Europe and Egypt and different places in the Middle East. There’s a thing kicking them out of like, Rome in like, the middle of the —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — second century BCE —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: So they’re already starting to like, you know, become known as a group of like, probably like diviners that are doing divination.

MWM: Yeah. One thing that’s unclear is whether that refers to specific people, Chaldeans, or whether that refers to astrologers generally. So that might just refer to the practice of astrology. This is something that Cicero talks about in De Divinatione, right, is arguing against the practice, right? And so there is a sense that that might just be the term for astrologer at that time.

CB: Right. Yeah. Well, that’s one of the ambiguities about Cicero, because you get into this period with the early Greek and Roman sources where the type of astrology they start describing is like, somewhere between what we know about late Mesopotamian astrology and like, early Hellenistic astrology and what the dividing line is between those in terms of, for example, the use of the 12 houses seems to have come about by like, the late 2nd century, early 1st century BCE in the Greek texts, basically. But now we know that there were some precursors to that in the Mesopotamian tradition where there’s one text that focuses on planets that are rising or culminating or setting in the birth chart, and that having something significant to say about the future. So it clearly like, is a precursor to the later doctrine of the 12 houses.

MWM: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as we said, right, you see a lot of this stuff in the Mesopotamian texts and the late texts, and it’s very likely that there’s these methods of transmission between Mesopotamia and other places. In fact, some of the latest evidence for cuneiform we have is people talking about their teacher teaching – like, their teacher’s teacher knowing something about cuneiform. So there is this legacy of the knowledge surviving in like, little gaps here and there as people are slowly dying off and not teaching it to their apprentices. There are still a few people here and there who understand these texts.

But that marks a really important thing about cuneiform knowledge. I mean, we’ve already talked about the rediscovery in the 19th century. But you know, aside from these couple things that survive – so, Berossus being one of them, and then of course the theoretical concepts which were borrowed by Greco-Roman astronomy and astrology and then the Indian, you know, subcontinent. Everything else dies. Right? Which is like, it’s so fascinating. It’s sealed away, right? So all the other texts are just gone, and they’re not remembered.

CB: Because memory of how to read cuneiform —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — dies out, and even the —

MWM: Completely dies out.

CB: — locations like Babylonian by the first century is in ruins at this point, even though there’s —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — still maybe some people living there.

MWM: Yeah, exactly. The cities are mostly abandoned. You know, the Seleucids set up a new capital, so the Hellenistic ruler set up a new capital at Seleucia on the Tigris, right? So the cities are abandoned for the most part. The knowledge of the script is completely abandoned; the texts are buried in the ground. You know, fortunately for us, they’re all gone – like, they’re sealed away – and then it’s not ‘til the 19th century that they are dug up again and then deciphered and translated and suddenly, you know, all this knowledge we now have at our fingertips and we’re able to reconstruct it. And that’s really fun to like – I often talk about this with my students in class, like, just thinking about how history changes in the 19th century, right? you know, even at my university here at University of New Brunswick, you know, people sitting in the classroom 200 years ago would learn a history of the world that is based on Greco-Roman histories of the world, right, so where kind of different like, things like the Parisigon, the Babyloniacon, Egypticon and Herodotus and Deucidedes, and they would also learn about the history of the world from the Hebrew Bible, right? The creation of the world, the story in Genesis. Obviously, like, stories about creation of the world and our own scientific study have changed since then, but it’s not until the mid-19th century when suddenly you get access to just this incredible depth of textual information from Mesopotamia that really contextualizes both the Greco-Roman history of the world and the Hebrew Bible stories of creation. And that’s really fundamental. It places these things in a much wider context, in a much more interesting context for how people thought about where the world comes from but also as we’ve already talked about a couple times where knowledge comes from, right? Where things like astrology come from.

So at the rediscovery of cuneiform and the decipherment of cuneiform, our conceptions of our own human history have radically changed, right? Now we can read these really fascinating stories and read them in such an antiquity, which is really amazing.

CB: Yeah. Well, and that’s also true for the history of astrology because after the first century BCE, the greater part of Mesopotamian astrology gets passed off to the Greeks and Egyptians —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — and the Romans, and they start practicing it in their own language and start elaborating on it, and also elaborating on the astronomy and astronomical models that they inherited from the Mesopotamians and taking them further. But then knowledge of how to read cuneiform was lost and even the texts themselves were lost, but there still remained this cultural memory of astrology originating in Mesopotamia even though we didn’t have evidence or text for that. But then all of a sudden, we would occasionally see references to —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — you know, still astrologers being called Chaldeans even though —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — that came to be a generic term for astrologer from the first century forward regardless of where they were from. Or you have stray references from like, Firmicus for example in the 4th century has this reference saying that the exaltation, that the Babylonians used to call the exaltations the houses of the planets. And I have no idea like, how he knows that still in —

MWM: Yeah, right!

CB: — the 4th century CE. Like, that’s always blown me away, and I’d like to know what —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — text he was drawing on for that. But otherwise, it was like, that knowledge of like, actually validating that astrology came from Mesopotamia was largely forgotten. And then all of a sudden in the 19th century, the rediscovery of the tablets as well as the ability to translate that suddenly opened things up so that now this can be validated, that astrology truly did originate in Mesopotamia in terms of the Western astrological tradition.

MWM: Yeah. No, you described it very well. Like, it’s really a fascinating story, and it opens up so much more for us to study. And as I’ve said before, like, it’s not done, right? Like, there’s still so much more we can read.

And I should say this is also the case for Greco-Roman material as well, right? Like, I mentioned Herculaneum briefly right – you know, the charred scrolls there that are being amazingly, you know, digitally unwrapped using modern methods are now giving us contemporary witnesses to texts from that period which otherwise we don’t have, right? So we can study new material then.

CB: There’s a really cool one with that, which is one text was scanned with x-rays, and it contained a piece of a text on the history of the philosophical schools from a lost work attributed to Philademus, and it contained a story about at the end of his life Plato meeting with – having a Chaldean visitor at some point towards the —

MWM: Oh wow, I didn’t – that’s really cool!

CB: Yeah, well, and it’s really important because in —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — Plato in the Timaeus already Plato associates the planets with fate and with the Fates.

MWM: Yeah.

CB: But this is happening in this period, you know, not long after natal astrology is developed, and surely in the broader context of things he probably has some sort of knowledge or understanding of the Mesopotamians and their use of the planets in connection with fate for centuries up to that point.

MWM: Yeah. Yeah. And this is like, the same thing with like, the Zodiac Man, right? Like, associations between the zodiac and parts of the body. Like, you know, we get this in medieval manuscripts, you know, drawn out for us in really, you know, beautiful illustrations. But, you know, in cuneiform texts we have this spelled out right in text. And so, you know, we’re finding more of this stuff, yeah.

CB: Yeah. So and there’s a lot more that will be found, because archaeological digs continue to happen in the Middle East as well as in Egypt and other places that are finding new texts and other things all the time.

MWM: Yep. Exactly. So like, I mentioned the Herculaneum stuff for Greco-Roman world. There’s the whole Oxyrinkus papyrus cache in Egypt that has been around for a long time, but is being discovered – or I should say utilized, you know, better more recently. Really fascinating material. And then, yeah, as you mentioned, in Mesopotamia there’s archaeological projects that are excavating now. I mean, there’s a lot of kind of modern, historical, political just events and impacts that affect archeology, but archeology in Iraq is really taking off again. You know, working much more in collaboration with Iraqi colleagues. And they’re discovering really amazing stuff. So you know, we hear about this every year at annual conferences and papers published, but one like, just little interesting tidbit – like, there’s a team excavating one of the gates at Nineveh now, re-excavating. And in excavating the gate, they found in one of the little side rooms of the gatehouse some tablets, and some of the tablets there are these ritual tablets that are part of a ritual that involves the king exiting the city, going out into the wilderness, performing some ritual, and coming back in. Well, the tablets found in the gatehouse are parts of this ritual, and you can imagine that the, you know, the ritual specialist who’s processing with the king, taking him on this important ritual, which of course also has astrological significance and is timed to do with various time periods in the year, you know, stepping out and then briefly excusing himself to like, check the ritual instructions in the gatehouse as he like, leaves the city, right? So —

CB: Right.

MWM: — these new excavations are giving us really fascinating little glimpses into how these texts, you know, maybe operated in real life, right? Because as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the material that we work with was excavated either quite poorly or looted from the antiquities market – or sold on the antiquities market from looted material. And so we lack that context. But knowing that like, an astrological text was found in someone’s house, knowing that a ritual text is found in a gatehouse for quick, you know, reference or something like that lets us tell a much more compelling story but also places it in a richer context for our own scholarship.

CB: Right, that’s brilliant and that’s really exciting. Yeah. So we’ll continue to see how scholarship develops and how our understanding of Mesopotamian astrology and its influence on the later traditions probably continues to become clearer and clearer in the coming years as this work is being done.

MWM: Yeah, exactly.

CB: Yeah. What do you – tell me about what you’re working on. You have a book you’re working on that relates to this, right?

MWM: Yeah. So I’m trying to publish – this is a common thing – publish your dissertation when you finish it. So I’m working on getting all those texts together. I’m actually going to the British Museum this summer, as I mentioned earlier, to do some final checks on tablets that I’m studying for this book.

So it’s an addition – so a translation and commentary – of the series of astrological tables that we looked at briefly. We showed pictures of. They were published – a few of them were published in the mid-20th century, and they’re somewhat famous because of these images. But they’ve never really been studied as a larger corpus, and so part of my dissertation work was finding other examples that have never been seen before and incorporating them into the text edition.

So it’s a 12-tablet series, one for each sign of the zodiac; it has these spreadsheets of information that we’ve talked about earlier. So it’s a big project —

CB: With the 12 parts?

MWM: Yeah, with the 12 parts, exactly. So I describe it as a spreadsheet, right, because it’s 12 tables. Each table has 12 columns, and then it’s got these rows of information that are associated with these pairings of the zodiac signs.

So that’s one big project. I’m trying to get that done and get that out, mainly because these texts are often referenced by people, but they still reference this mid-20th century publication that only published a couple of them, right? And I have found more, and I wanna get these out so other people can use them because they’re a really good example of exactly what I described – this kind of interesting innovation in the late period that I wanna people to be able to reference. So I wanna get that out, get that done.

And then I mentioned briefly this research project I have, looking at theoretical systems of association in astrological texts. So that’s something – I applied for a grant here in Canada, a short grant Social Sciences and Human Research Council, and so they gave me a small grant and I’ve hired students to work on these texts with me and try to do some of this quantitative. One of the themes of, you know, I work on the ancient Near East, but I’m also really interested in quantitative approaches to history, how we can kind of think about history using data and computers, and so I’m trying to do some more of that with this grant.

And then down the road, I’d really love to write a more accessible book about the history of science in Mesopotamia, in a really kind of pluralistic view. I think it’s come across a couple times already, but I really take this wide view of what science can be in Mesopotamia and how science operates. And so I think it would be nice. This is also, I should say, where the history and philosophy of science as a field has been moving, and I give a lot of credit to my former supervisor, Francesca Rochberg, for really building a lot of this groundwork. She’s written a ton of great material on this. Her thinking about science in this more complicated way than just theory and experimentation and the modern method, right? So I’d like to write something a little larger, a little bit, you know, accessible about the history of science in Mesopotamia that deals with astrology, astronomy, it deals with mathematics, it deals with other forms of divination. You know, all sorts of stuff, because I think there’s a lot to learn and a lot of really interesting texts.

And then besides that, you know, I do a little work on science and religion as well in history. And so working on, you know, writing around that topic as well.

CB: Amazing. Yeah. Well, that’s a really good then area, since it’s obviously like, the crossovers almost, you know, nowhere is it more striking than with astrology and —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — astronomy and the history of that.

MWM: Yeah, exactly. So like, you know, our modern divisions just don’t apply at all in Babylonia, and we can show that they don’t apply because they have one word. It’s the, you know, the Tupsaru, right, of Enamu Anu Enlil. The scholarship of Enamu Anu Enlil is the name for all the scribes. They take on this term themselves – the name for scribes who work on what we now call astronomy and what we now call astrology. They are the same thing. So it’s such an easy division to – I should say false division, false dichotomy to show, because we have them telling us exactly what they’re working on.

CB: You had a word for that didn’t you that you came up with?

MWM: Astronomology?

CB: Yeah, I thought that was a good word!

MWM: Yeah, right!

CB: Yeah.

MWM: Yeah, yeah, I liked the – maybe I’ll incorporate that into a publication some time. But yeah, I mean, that’s – and I mentioned Anu Bel Shinu, this really famous scholar from the late period, right? Like, we have his name on tablets, and the tablets we have are a whole mix of things, right? He’s doing complex astronomy; he’s doing complex astrology. He’s doing all this stuff. And he thinks of them all as the same, right? Or, you know, not exactly the same, but he thinks of them all as a common discipline. And that’s just really good evidence of that, the mixing there.

CB: Brilliant. All right, that sounds amazing. Well, I look forward to seeing that publication – all of those publications – but especially the one on the 12 Parts. So yeah, maybe we can talk about that in the future at some point once the book —

MWM: Yeah!

CB: — comes out, because I’m —

MWM: I’d be happy to.

CB: Yeah, that sounds really exciting. But yeah, thanks for doing this really sweeping overview. I think we’re out of time, so but I can’t believe how much we packed into three hours. So thanks so much for doing this —

MWM: Yeah!

CB: — with me and helping me to like, you know, explore such a vast subject of thousands of years of history.

MWM: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. This was a really engaging conversation, and you know, I hope people find it interesting, but there’s just so much cool stuff to pull out of Mesopotamian history and the texts. And I wanna reemphasize really this point about like, we are just so lucky about preservation, right? Like, the fact that all these things are preserved in clay, we’re able to dig them up, we’re able to date them, we’re able to read them, we’re able to see the progression of people’s thinking, right? Not a single person’s thinking, but the progression of how these scribes are thinking about the world around them and developing their models is really unprecedented. Thousands of years of this history, which is really, really cool.

CB: Yeah, and just the preservation but also that the language was like, deciphered and then, you know, all of the scholarship that’s happened and continues to happen, you know, surrounding that. But also something that people can perhaps take part in and hopefully hearing this maybe it will, you know, some people will take inspiration from listening to this discussion we’ve had and maybe go to school and take some of the training and the languages that would be necessary to take part in that recovery.

MWM: Yeah! It takes a while to get the training, but it is very rewarding. It’s a lot of fun being able to read these things. I mean, that’s kind of why I got into it, because I loved reading ancient languages and then, you know, I spent a year of high school in Turkey and realized that the world was older than Greece and Rome, and suddenly I wanted to do, you know, go further back. And it’s really fun. It’s really cool stuff.

CB: Well, and so many of our concepts – not just in astrology, but culturally – reading about how they preceded by hundreds or thousands of years in Mesopotamia and like, religion or other cultural things is just incredibly fascinating.

MWM: Yeah. I mean, like, you know, we talk about legal systems, Hammurabi, right? The law code of Hammarabi. It’s fascinating. They had law courts with processes of discovery and bailiffs, right, over 4,000 years ago, right? It’s just like, it’s amazing to think that these procedures are so old.

CB: Well, and that’s really important, and you can cut us off at any time because I know —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — you have to go soon, but there’s a legalistic framework that the astrological omens were placed in, which is part of the way they’re presented and delineated, but it’s also tied in with their views of fate, right?

MWM: Yeah. So actually, I should have mentioned this earlier. When I mentioned the “if p, then q” system or syntax in how we describe how these omens are actually written and read, yeah, it’s the same as what we find in law. It’s the same as what we find in medicine. Right? This method of thinking about a potential event and its significance is common throughout, right? So yet again, another example of how disciplines are merged or how – it even makes us question whether it’s the idea of disciplines or ways of thinking or just the mode of the way the brain works, right. They are understanding some sort of commonality between how a law is formulated, how an omen is formulated, how a diagnosis is performed, right? There’s like, a commonality that runs through all of those things that I think we struggle a little bit to conceptualize.

CB: Yeah. I mean, we have later conceptualizations of like, the law of nature in some —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — sense. And there’s almost —

MWM: Yeah.

CB: — like a parallel here to the extent that in the astrological texts, there’s a concept of fate, and it’s connected with this notion of that which is determined by decree.

MWM: Yeah, yeah. Right. So like, you could see a commonality in how law works in that regard, yeah. So there’s definitely that aspect.

CB: Yeah. All right, cool. Well, we could talk all day, but I think —

MWM: Yeah!

CB: — we’ll end it there. Thank you so much for joining me today; I really appreciate it.

MWM: Yeah! My pleasure. Thank you very much.

CB: All right. Cool. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.

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