Australian Sky & Telescope - April 2018

http://www.skyandtelescope.com.au 37

LION: HEVELIUS

did so only as late as the 5th century BCE under the influence

of Persian Sun-worship.

Horoscope astrology as we think of it

today developed even later: It didn’t attain

its final form and great popularity until

the 3rd century CE, when the social

and political dislocations of the

decaying Roman Empire made the

powerless multitudes vulnerable to

any superstition that promised knowledge

about the insecure future and some illusion of

control over it.

Lunar vs solar

The First Babylonian Dynasty was founded in 1894 BCE,

but the calculation of lunar calendars dates to even

further back. The Sumerians, the cultural predecessors of

the Babylonians in southern Mesopotamia, are usually

credited with the development of a calendar based on

lunar months. The precedence of a lunar over a solar

calendar is logical: The path the Moon follows among

the stars is much easier to observe than the path of the

Sun. The downside of a lunar calendar is evident, however.

There isn’t an integral number of lunar months in a solar

year — it comes out to about 12 and a half — so it’s necessary

to add an occasional intercalary lunar month to keep a lunar

calendar in synch with the meteorological seasons.

The Sumero-Babylonian New Year began with the first

visible evening crescent Moon following vernal equinox (when

the Sun crosses the plane of Earth’s equator, south to north)

and therefore usually fell in what corresponds to our late

March/early April. Month names, keyed to the lunar calendar,

appear on Sumerian clay tablets written before 3000 BCE. But

most of the Sumerian month names known to us relate to

religious festivals that took place during those months: None

refer explicitly to any constellation on the ecliptic.

The Babylonian ‘lunar zodiac’

The oldest, complete, surviving astronomical work is a

2-tablet compilation titled (by the ancients themselves,

after its first words) MUL.APIN, meaning ‘Constellation

of the Plow’. Several copies of it — broken, but almost fully

restorable — were found in the mid-19th century in the ruins

of the palace at Nineveh of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal

(r. 668–627 BCE). These tablets were written in the early 7th

century BCE, but internal evidence suggests that the text

itself was actually composed before 1000 BCE.

Sumero-Babylonian constellations

‘In the Path of the Moon’

Name Translation Identification

MUL.MUL Th Constellatio par excellence Pleiades

Gu 4 -an-na Bull of Heaven Taurus

Sipa-zi-an-na Steadfast Shepherd of Heaven Orion

Šu-gi Old Man, Wizard Perseus

Perseus

Gàm Scimitar, Wizard’s Wand Double

Cluster

Maš-tab-ba gal-gal Great Twins Gemini

AL-LUL Crab Cancer

UR-GUL-LA Lion Leo

Ab-sín Ear of Grain Spica

Ziba ̄ni ̄tum Scales Libra

Gír-tab Scorpion Scorpius

Pa-bil-sag [an archaic war-god] Sagittarius

Šuhur-mašku6 Goat-Fish Capricornus

MUL.GU-LA The Great Constellation Aquarius

Kunmeš Tail (of the Fishes) Pisces

Ším-mah Great Swallow Circlet of Pisces

Anuni ̄tum [the goddess Ishtar]^ Northern Fish

&Beta(β)And

lúHun-gá Hired Laborer, Plowman Head of Aries

These entries come from the MUL.APIN, Tablet 1, column iv, lines 33-57. The

transcriptions in the left column follow standard Assyriological practice for

transcribing the original cuneiform.