24 Rochberg
tables are designed for computation of positions for synodic appearances,
not the appearances on arbitrary dates. Interpolation schemes would be
necessary to adapt the methods of the ephemerides to use for horoscopes.THE ANCIENT SCHOLARS’ PERCEPTION OF THE NATURAL WORLD
AND THEIR CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE OF IT
Having introduced the relevant sources and their particular concerns, we
may now address the question of the nature of the scribes’ knowledge of
the phenomenal world. While the category “nature” has no direct coun-
terpart in the Mesopotamian sources, natural phenomena were clearly
a central focus for observation and systematic thought. We shall there-
fore attempt to defi ne, in terms appropriate to the cuneiform material,
a picture of the phenomenal world, which was the object of inquiry in
ancient Mesopotamian scribal scholarship. In the following, an appeal to
mythological texts will aid in the defi nition of the ideological background
for scholarly inquiry, not because a religious mode of thought about the
world is characteristic of the ancient scribes, but only because a continuity
of thought is evidenced between divination and cosmological mythology.
We do not see such a continuity of thought as grounds for a claim about
a nonrational or animistic or mythopoeic mode of cognition.
According to our major source for Babylonian cosmology, the poem
Enu ̄ma Eliš, as well as other mythological sources in the background of
Enu ̄ma Eliš, form and order in the world came to be from a prior state of
formlessness. Cosmogony did not focus on a natural order, but a divine and
political one that included the natural. The divine order provided a struc-
ture of authority, with AN ruling remote heaven, Ea (Sumerian, EN.KI) rul-
ing the waters around and below the earth, and EN.LÍL the space between
the great above and the great below with its atmosphere and wind. In the
revisionist cosmogony of Enu ̄ma Eliš, Marduk is made the preeminent au-
thority; the seven gods of the “destinies” and the fi fty Anunnaki and three
hundred Igigi come after.^28 This last divine cosmic arrangement was part of
a fi xed order that came into existence with creation and became a perma-
nent characteristic of the cosmos. Included with this fi xed order—indeed,
made possible by it—were omens and portents: “the norms had been fi xed
(and) all [their] portents.”^29 That physical phenomena were signs meant
to portend the future for humankind was laid down as part of creation.
The channel of communication between divine and human, evidenced
by the belief in the effi cacy of divination, was therefore seen as part of the
original structure of the world. As stated in the concluding paragraph of a