Wrestling with Nature From Omens to Science

30 Rochberg lenistic period. Consider the following colophon from a lunar ephemeris written about 190 BCE: On eclipses of the mo ...

Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia 31 tupšar Enu ̄ma Anu Enlil, literally, “scribe of Enu ̄ma Anu Enlil.” The mean- ing o ...

32 Rochberg called Re ̄š sanctuary. Accordingly, on the upper edge of the astronomical tablets from Babylon, an invocation “acco ...

Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia 33 that it was still copied and collated by the scribes. Regardless of the way celestia ...

34 Rochberg A. J. Sachs and Hermann Hunger, Astronomical Diaries and Related texts from Babylonia, vol. 1: Diaries from 652 B.C ...

Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia 35 Assyriologique Internationale Prague, July 1–5, 1996, ed. Jirˇí Prosecký (Prague: Ac ...

36 Rochberg Parpola, Letters, 319. It should be noted that in Seleucid texts, the distinction between scribe and priest, both wr ...

37 What did the ancients know about objects in nature? What even was an object in nature for them? What was nature? Who were the ...

38 Lehoux not just by the methods of investigation, but also by the larger reasons people saw themselves as having for investiga ...

Natural Knowledge in the Classical World 39 thinker. He had thought through these propositions and made deliberate decisions on ...

40 Lehoux inheritance theory), meteorology, psychology, mathematics, acoustics, and more. Just a glance at an index to Aristotle ...

Natural Knowledge in the Classical World 41 four claims we saw earlier, that the cosmos is eternal, spherical, complete, and div ...

42 Lehoux retical understanding is not a measure of its intrinsic inadequacy—it was very adequate for a very long time—so much a ...

Natural Knowledge in the Classical World 43 idea repeatedly in his cosmological works. We have already seen the ar- gument that ...

44 Lehoux The infi nity of the cosmos likewise emerges elegantly from a thought ex- periment: if the world were fi nite, what wo ...

Natural Knowledge in the Classical World 45 collection and organization of massive amounts of data (his own and the work of prev ...

46 Lehoux that philosophers will ever be agreed about them!” But mathematics!— now there is a subject to inspire the mind: Only ...

Natural Knowledge in the Classical World 47 already established. The lay of the scientifi c land, the established inter- connect ...

48 Lehoux the fact that something is hiding in there in abeyance. But it does not cover an ignorance of what that something is. ...

Natural Knowledge in the Classical World 49 interests were biological rather than strictly medical. Within the medical tradition ...