the mid-third century BC, employed rather more ad hoc methods, but more accurate
parameters than System A (Britton and Walker 1996 : 62 ; Britton 2003 ), which we
presume derived from a close scrutiny of the existing database of cuneiform Diaries
and similar materials (Britton 2002 : 53 ). Why a change was considered necessary is
hard to fathom. Aaboe’s suggestion of ‘a delight in mathematical complexity’ (quoted
in Britton 2003 : 46), seems improbable. Dissatisfaction with existing parameters
seems far likelier, and we can only assume that that dissatisfaction emerged through
a comparison of what was predicted with what was seen.
CONCLUSIONIn Babylonia during the Hellenistic period, scholarly activity was particularly vibrant
when it came to the astral sciences. More than half of all surviving texts written in
cuneiform dating to the period after the fall of Persian Babylonia to Alexander were
astronomical-astrological in content. So important to the scholars of Hellenistic
Babylonia was the significance of the motions of the heavenly bodies that they
continued to use cuneiform for far longer than might otherwise have been expected
(Brown forthcoming b). The youngest of the most sophisticated sort of astronomical
texts stopped being written in cuneiform around 30 BC(though the data predicted
applied to still younger times), simultaneously with the last datable literary texts.
Less sophisticated astronomical texts, however, continued to be written in that script
for at least another century, the very latest of them showing signs that their authors
no longer mastered cuneiform as their predecessors once had.
The period from the first century BConwards saw the rapid increase in the popularity
of personal astrology, such as horoscopy, in areas exposed to Hellenistic thinking.
While Babylonian astronomy-astrology had influenced scholars writing in foreign
languages and scripts in earlier times, it would appear that, during the century and
a half before the birth of Christ and the century after, the methods, parameters, and
insights that had once been known virtually exclusively only to those well-versed in
cuneiform came to be understood by those writing in cursive scripts – Greek, Demotic
and Aramaic in particular. Cuneiform’s last niche market was lost to competitors,
and the script slipped into redundancy.
Thereafter, the awareness of Babylonia’s legacy in both astronomy and astrology
was gradually lost. The Egyptians, for example, were often falsely credited with an
astrological tradition that was essentially Babylonian. The Indians adopted zodiacal
astrology and Babylonian parameters in their siddha ̄ ntaswritten in the centuries after
Christ, but credited only the Yavana, or ‘Ionian’ Greeks. Ptolemy the astronomer,
writing in Alexandria during the second century AD, recorded Babylonian observations
in his Syntaxis,^21 and this, combined with an awareness that some parameters were
‘Babylonian’ and a confused record of ‘Chaldaean’ astrology preserved in some Greco-
Roman literature and in the Bible,^22 constituted pretty much all that posterity had
passed down to the nineteenth century ADof the tremendous legacy of cuneiform
astral science.
That changed, however, with the decipherment of cuneiform. From the 1880 s
onwards discoveries have been made that Swerdlow ( 1998 : 2 ) has characterised as ‘the
most important, the most revolutionary, in the entire study of science in antiquity,
perhaps in the entire study of the history of science’, and they continue to this day.
— Mesopotamian astral science —