21 Barton 1994 : 23 – 31 , and for details on the cultural interactions in the astral sciences between
Mesopotamia, India, Greece, Iran, the West Semitic areas, and Egypt, see Brown (forth-
coming c).
22 E.g. Isaiah 47 : 12 – 14.
23 While Hellenistic astrology was a far more complicated beast than its Babylonian counterpart,
Neugebauer is wrong to argue ( 1975 : 613 ) that ‘with the exception of some typical Mesopotamian
relics the doctrine [of astrology] was changed in Greek hands to a universal system in which
form alone it could spread all over the world’. That many Babylonian astrological techniques
spread to Greece, Egypt, India, and elsewhere gives the lie to this.
24 Hipparchus (fl. c. 125 BC) was probably the first Greek astronomer who managed to devise a
workable kinematic model. His debt to cuneifom astronomy was first revealed by F. X. Kugler
1900 : 21 , 24 , 40 , 46 , 108. Toomer 1988 : 361 writes that Hipparchus’ ‘originality and
inventiveness are beyond question’, but that his achievement ‘would not have been possible
without the resources of Babylonian astronomy’ to which he adds that ‘the idea of astronomy
as a practical predictive science was another debt of his to the Babylonians’, and finally that
Hipparchus ‘both directly as an advocate of astrology, and indirectly as a developer of astronomical
methods which became an essential part of it, was pivotal’ to the spread of Babylonian astrology
to the Greek world.
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— Mesopotamian astral science —