12 Rochberg
following series of topics. A description of sources and their contents in
the fi rst section will highlight three areas: the divination corpus and its
major classifi cations, celestial divination and horoscopy, and astronomy in
relation to celestial divination and astrology. In the past, the late Babylo-
nian astronomy, both tabular (ephemerides) and nontabular (procedures,
diaries, almanacs, goal- year texts), occupied almost exclusively the atten-
tion of historians of science because of its signifi cant relation to Greek
astronomy.^3 Here I will consider it in the context of celestial divination
and horoscopes. The second section will venture into analysis of “native”
terminology, by means of which we may gain some access into the ancient
Mesopotamians’ views of the study of the phenomena. To establish a frame
of reference, some aspects of Mesopotamian cosmology will be reviewed,
followed by the nature of knowledge, and fi nally the notion of a “knower”
considered as far as it is possible from a Mesopotamian point of view.THE SOURCES
The cuneiform tablets that catalogue, systematize, describe, and predict
observable natural phenomena provide us with sources for reconstruct-
ing the history of natural knowledge in the Mesopotamian Near East. We
may divide these sources conveniently into two chronologically separate
groups; the earlier represents the product of second and early- fi rst mil-
lennia (ca. 1800–600 BCE) scribal scholarship, while the later stems from
Achaemenid (ca. 500–300 BCE) and Hellenistic Babylonian (300 BCE–
75 CE) archives, primarily those of the cities of Babylon and Uruk. Texts of
the “early” tradition, however, continued to be copied in the later period.
The persistence of tradition, even in the face of the progress of knowledge
seen especially in the late astronomy, is a feature of the culture of Meso-
potamian science. Our chronological scheme, therefore, does not imply
an evolutionary process in which the contents of the more sophisticated
late sources replace those of the simpler earlier phase.
The principal extant works of the earlier group come from the seventh-
century BCE library housed within the palace of Assurbanipal at Nineveh.
Part of this library was excavated at the mound of Kuyunjik on the Tigris
by Austen Henry Layard from 1850 to 1851, another part during 1853 by
Hormuzd Rassam. All the while, efforts to decipher cuneiform were bear-
ing fruit, and by 1857, the successful test sponsored by the Royal Asiatic
Society was carried out by Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, Edward Hincks,
and W. H. Fox Talbot. Much of what we know today of the contents and
character of the Mesopotamian tradition of scribal scholarship derives