30 Rochberg
lenistic period. Consider the following colophon from a lunar ephemeris
written about 190 BCE:On eclipses of the moon.
Tablet of Anu- be ̄l- šunu, lamentation priest of Anu, son of Nidintu- Anu, de-
scendant of Sin- le ̄qi- unninni of Uruk. Hand of Anu- [aba- utêr, his son, scri]be
of Enu ̄ma Anu Enlil of Uruk. Uruk, month I, year 12[1?] Antiochus [... ]
Whoever reveres Anu and Antu [... ]
Computational table. The wisdom of Anu- ship, exclusive knowledge of the
god [... ]
Secret knowledge of the masters. The one who knows may show (it) to an
[other one who knows]. One who does not know may not [see it. It belongs
to the forbidden things] of Anu, Enlil [and Ea, the great gods].^45In view of the interdiction against persons outside the circle of “know-
ers,” as well as the implication that the knowledge contained in the tablets
of divine secrets and wisdom was transmitted from a divine source, the
nature of knowledge, in terms of the scribes’ own references to the con-
tents of specifi c texts, was considered arcane.
On the other hand, our investigation of the practice of celestial divi-
nation and of observational and mathematical astronomy would have us
conclude that knowledge about celestial phenomena in the Mesopotamian
practice was derived by textual hermeneutics, empiricism, theoretization,
and prediction. When a celestial omen specialist interpreted the meaning
of a phenomenon by reference to the omen compendium, the authority
of the interpretation was grounded in the text, not on a claim to divine in-
spiration. Mesopotamian divination was not prophecy; rather, it operated
on the basis of interpreting the divinely decided consequences of phe-
nomena. In some cases, signs were taken to counterbalance or annul other
signs, and such exegetical techniques allowed for much latitude in inter-
pretation.^46 In addition, before we conjure up too extreme a picture of an
exclusive learned society, it is worth noting that, as M. Stolper showed in
the case of Be ̄l- ittannu of the fourth century BCE, one and the same scribe
has been discovered to participate in both learned scholarship and clerical
record- keeping. Stolper observed that “the same men sometimes wrote
texts of both sorts and sometimes stored their archives and their libraries
together. Excavated and reconstructed groups of late Achaemenid tablets
from Ur, Uruk, and Nippur that included legal and administrative as well
as scholarly and practical texts foster the same view.”^47
To return specifi cally to the astronomically informed, one of the pro-
fessional titles encountered in the colophons of astronomical texts is