In the Path of the Moon
Subtitle: Babylonian Celestial Divination and Its Legacy
Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
Published: 2010
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 445
ISBN-13: 9789004183896
Description: Celestial divination, in the form of omens from lunar, planetary, astral, and meteorological phenomena, was central to Mesopotamian cuneiform scholarship and science from the late second millennium BCE into the Hellenistic period. Beyond the boundaries of ancient Mesopotamia, the ideas, texts, and traditions of Babylonian celestial divination are traceable in Hellenistic sciences and philosophies. This collection of essays investigates features of Babylonian celestial divination with special focus on those aspects that influenced later Greco-Roman astronomy, astrology, and theories of signs. A multi-faceted collection of philological, historical, and philosophical investigations, In the Path of the Moon offers Assyriologists, Classicists, and historians of ancient science a wide-ranging series of studies unified around the theme of Babylonian celestial divination's legacy.

"The collected essays in this volume, successive steps in an ordered path, constitute an invaluable contribution to a better understanding of Babylonian divination."

Lorenzo Verderame, "Sapienza" Università di Roma
Table of contents: title: CONTENTS; title: Chapter One Fate and Divination in Mesopotamia; title: Chapter Two New Evidence for the History of Astrology; title: Chapter Three Canonicity in Cuneiform Texts; title: Chapter Four The Assumed 29th Aḫû Tablet of Enūma Anu Enlil; title: Chapter Five TCL 6 13: Mixed Traditions in Late Babylonian Astrology; title: Chapter Six Benefic and Malefic Planets in Babylonian Astrology; title: Chapter Seven Elements of the Babylonian Contribution to Hellenistic Astrology; title: Chapter Eight Babylonian Seasonal Hours; title: Chapter Nine Babylonian Horoscopy: The Texts and their Relations; title: Chapter Ten Continuity and Change in Omen Literature; title: Chapter Eleven The Babylonian Origins of the Mandaean Book of the Zodiac; title: Chapter Twelve Scribes and Scholars: The Ṭupšar Enūma Anu Enlil; title: Chapter Thirteen Lunar Data in Babylonian Horoscopes; title: Chapter Fourteen A Babylonian Rising Times Scheme in Non-Tabular Astronomical Texts; title: Chapter Fifteen Old Babylonian Celestial Divination; title: Chapter Sixteen The Heavens and the Gods in Ancient Mesopotamia: The View from a Polytheistic Cosmology; title: Chapter Seventeen A Short History of the Waters Above the Firmament; title: Chapter Eighteen Periodicities and Period Relations in Babylonian Celestial Sciences; title: Chapter Nineteen Conditionals, Inference, and Possibility in Ancient Mesopotamian Science; title: Chapter Twenty “If P, then Q”: Form and Reasoning in Babylonian Divination; title: Chapter Twenty-One Divine Causality and Babylonian Divination