9In the ancient Near East, long before the Greeks’ earliest forays into the
causes of natural phenomena, what we now call science provided meth-
ods for the systematic study of the world of perceptions, experience, and
imagination. Such methods and their resulting bodies of knowledge, how-
ever, are inevitably historically and culturally determined, even where
there is transmission and continuity along some well- defi ned lines, as, for
example, in the history of Western astronomy. Changes in the practice
and meaning of science in history and across cultures have been accompa-
nied by changes in the perception and understanding of nature as well. In
the context of the ancient Near East, and in particular Babylonia—which
represents the most important locus of scientifi c activity before the clas-
sical period of ancient Greece—we can say at the outset that neither the
words nor the concepts “science” and “nature” were part of the conceptual
landscape. The same is true for astronomy, as we understand it today.
But it does not follow from this that celestial inquiry in ancient Meso-
potamia has no place in the history of astronomy. In arguing against a
unifi ed image not only of science but also nature, Thomas Kuhn once
stated that natural phenomena were not “the same for all cultures,” and
that “the heavens of the Greeks were irreducibly different from ours.”^1 Yet
he also insisted that this “does not mean that one cannot, with suffi cient
patience and effort, discover the categories of another culture or of an
earlier stage of one’s own.”^2 This chapter will address the question of what
the study of celestial phenomena meant for the ancient Babylonians, sug-
CHAPTER 1Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia
Francesca Rochberg