Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia 11phrates. The extant written record from ancient Mesopotamia is made up
of cuneiform texts in the languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian,
and Assyrian. It consists of hundreds of thousands of clay tablets and frag-
ments and spans three thousand years, from the so- called Archaic Tablets
of the late- fourth- and early- third- millennium BCE temple archives of the
city of Uruk and other Sumerian city- states to the latest dated tablets of
the fi rst- century CE astronomical archive of the temple at Babylon (lo-
cated some eighty- fi ve kilometers south of the site of modern Baghdad).
Bureaucratic administrative archives constitute the overwhelming bulk
of the documentation. The next largest category of sources, many thou-
sands of tablets, is made up of texts concerned with the systematic inquiry
into elements of physical existence, or, to employ a native classifi catory
term, “whatever pertains to complementary elements of celestial and ter-
restrial parts of the universe (and) those of the cosmic subterranean wa-
ters.” These sources span the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1800 BCE) to the
Parthian period (second century BCE–fi rst century CE). The latest dated
cuneiform tablet is an astronomical text of 75 CE, and the Babylonian as-
tronomical tradition would continue to infl uence quantitative astronomi-
cal science into the late Greco- Roman period and beyond.
It is worth emphasizing in the present context that virtually all our
information for the Mesopotamian interest and understanding of natural
phenomena derives from the cuneiform sources directly. Descriptions of
Babylonian astronomy and astrology in works of Greek and Roman writ-
ers, such as Berossus, Strabo, Pliny, Diodorus Siculus, and Vettius Valens,
prove to be unreliable, although these Greco- Roman authors preserved
this legacy of ancient Mesopotamia in the West. From the rough numbers
of tablets cited above it would appear as though there is an overabundance
of material, more than enough to produce a full reconstruction and a clear
insight into the mind of the ancient Mesopotamian “natural inquirer.”
Such a reconstruction, however, is fraught with problems both practical
and interpretative. On the practical side is the fact that not all the works
of central importance to the analysis of the ancient inquiry into natural
phenomena have been reconstructed or edited, particularly those dealing
with astrology. On the interpretative side, the relationships between the
various parts of the ancient system of knowledge about the physical world
is far from clear as the very classifi cation of physical and metaphysical,
material and divine, and the cosmological framework within which it has
meaning appears to be quite different from that of the dominantly Greco-
Roman Western tradition that fl owed from it.
Since the subject of ancient Near Eastern inquiry into the phenomena
of nature is vast, the present discussion will cut a narrow path along the