Download or read book The Babylonian Theory of the Planets written by N. M. Swerdlow and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second millennium b.c., Babylonian scribes assembled a vast collection of astrological omens, believed to be signs from the gods concerning the kingdom's political, military, and agricultural fortunes. The importance of these omens was such that from the eighth or seventh until the first century, the scribes observed the heavens nightly and recorded the dates and locations of ominous phenomena of the moon and planets in relation to stars and constellations. The observations were arranged in monthly reports along with notable events and prices of agricultural commodities, the object being to find correlations between phenomena in the heavens and conditions on earth. These collections of omens and observations form the first empirical science of antiquity and were the basis of the first mathematical science, astronomy. For it was discovered that planetary phenomena, although irregular and sometimes concealed by bad weather, recur in limited periods within cycles in which they are repeated on nearly the same dates and in nearly the same locations. N. M. Swerdlow's book is a study of the collection and observation of ominous celestial phenomena and of how intervals of time, locations by zodiacal sign, and cycles in which the phenomena recur were used to reduce them to purely arithmetical computation, thereby surmounting the greatest obstacle to observation, bad weather. The work marks a striking advance in our understanding of both the origin of scientific astronomy and the astrological divination through which the kingdoms of ancient Mesopotamia were governed. Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Babylon to Voyager and Beyond written by David Leverington and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-29 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of planetary research from ancient astronomers to more recent spacecraft missions.
Download or read book Babylonian Planetary Omens Part Four written by Erica Reiner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the edition and translation of first-millennium BC Babylonian omens derived from the appearance and movements of the planet Jupiter. David Pingree’s introduction and astronomical commentary shows the extent of the Babylonian scholars’ knowledge of astronomical phenomena.
Download or read book From the Omens of Babylon written by Michael Baigent and published by Penguin Mass Market. This book was released on 1994 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Omens of Babylon examines the fusion of religion, astrology, and magic of ancient Babylonia and shows how many of the Mesopotamians' teachings and beliefs are present in contemporary astrology.
Download or read book Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy astrology written by David Brown and published by Brill. This book was released on 2000 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pliny wrote of Babylon that "here the creator of the science of astronomy was". Excavations have shown this statement to be true. This book argues that the earliest attempts at the accurate prediction of celestial phenomena are indeed to be found in clay tablets dating to the 8th and 7th centuries BC from both Babylon and from Nineveh. The author carefully situates this astronomy within its cultural context, treating all available material from the relevant period, and also analysing the earlier astrological material and the later well-known ephemerides and related texts. A wholly new approach to cuneiform astral concerns emerges - one in which both celestial divination and the later astronomy are shown to be embedded in a prevailing philosophy dealing with the ideal nature of the early universe, and in which the dynamics of the celestial divination industry that surrounded the last Assyrian monarchs account for no less than the first recorded "scientific revolution". This work closely adheres to the original textual sources, and argues for the evolution on the basis of the needs of the ancient scholars and the internal logic of the divinatory and predictive systems employed. To this end, it offers, for the first time, a Mesopotamian contribution to the philosophy, and not only the history, of science.
Download or read book Babylonian Horoscopes written by Francesca Rochberg and published by American Philosophical Society. This book was released on 1998 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging for the first time in the 5th cent. B.C., horoscopes reflect the application of the idea and practice of celestial divination to the life of the individual. Whereas an omen focuses on a single astronomical phenomenon, the horoscope takes into account the positions of the moon, sun, and five planets at the moment of a birth. As such, Babylonian horoscopes presuppose the concept of the ecliptic and a methodology for obtaining the positions of heavenly bodies when they are not observable. This is the first complete edition of the extant cuneiform horoscopes -- with transcription and philological and astronomical commentary. This study offers a systematic description of the documents as a definable class of Babylonian astronomical/astrological texts.
Download or read book Hellenistic Astronomy written by Alan C. Bowen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-02-17 with total page 783 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hellenistic Astronomy: The Science in Its Contexts, renowned scholars address questions about what the ancient science of the heavens was and the numerous contexts in which it was pursued.
Download or read book Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy Procedure Texts written by Mathieu Ossendrijver and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains new translations and a new analysis of the procedure texts of Babylonian mathematical astronomy, the earliest known form of mathematical astronomy of the ancient world. The translations are based on a modern approach incorporating recent insights from Assyriology and translation science. The work contains updated and expanded interpretations of the astronomical algorithms and investigations of previously ignored linguistic, mathematical and other aspects of the procedure texts. Special attention is paid to issues of mathematical representation and over 100 photos of cuneiform tablets dating from 350-50 BCE are presented. In 2-3 years, the author intends to continue his study of Babylonian mathematical astronomy with a new publication which will contain new editions and reconstructions of approx. 250 tabular texts and a new philological, astronomical and mathematical analysis of these texts. Tabular texts are end products of Babylonian math astronomy, computed with algorithms that are formulated in the present volume, Procedure Texts.
Download or read book Alien Oceans written by Kevin Hand and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside the epic quest to find life on the water-rich moons at the outer reaches of the solar system Where is the best place to find life beyond Earth? We often look to Mars as the most promising site in our solar system, but recent scientific missions have revealed that some of the most habitable real estate may actually lie farther away. Beneath the frozen crusts of several of the small, ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn lurk vast oceans that may have existed for as long as Earth, and together may contain more than fifty times its total volume of liquid water. Could there be organisms living in their depths? Alien Oceans reveals the science behind the thrilling quest to find out. Kevin Peter Hand is one of today's leading NASA scientists, and his pioneering research has taken him on expeditions around the world. In this captivating account of scientific discovery, he brings together insights from planetary science, biology, and the adventures of scientists like himself to explain how we know that oceans exist within moons of the outer solar system, like Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. He shows how the exploration of Earth's oceans is informing our understanding of the potential habitability of these icy moons, and draws lessons from what we have learned about the origins of life on our own planet to consider how life could arise on these distant worlds. Alien Oceans describes what lies ahead in our search for life in our solar system and beyond, setting the stage for the transformative discoveries that may await us.
Download or read book Mesopotamian Astrology written by Ulla Susanne Koch and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is intended to serve as a general introduction to Mesopotamian astrology, both its outward phenomena and its inner structure.
Download or read book Babylonian Planetary Omens without special title written by Erica Reiner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third fascicle of Babylonian Planetary Omens contains the edition of all cuneiform texts dealing with the planet Venus known to us. Most of these tablets are kept in the British Museum; the large number of unpublished texts were transliterated and the previously published texts were checked and collated from the originals. The texts are accompanied by translations, and each group of texts is commented upon by David Pingree from the point of view of the text history and astronomical significance. A general introduction, also by David Pingree, analyzes the descriptions of Venus that occur in the texts in terms of astronomical phenomena. Indices are included to facilitate the study of this large corpus.
Download or read book The Babylonian Planet written by Sonja Neef and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated – from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant's vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space – an astro-culture – in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation, media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come.
Download or read book Astronomical Cuneiform Texts written by O. Neugebauer and published by Springer. This book was released on 1983-06-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published with the assistance of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
Download or read book Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia written by Abraham Sachs and published by Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A large volume of tablets, transliterated by Abraham Sachs and Hermann Hunger, of lunar and planetary information dating from the 8th to 1st century BC. The first part examines tablets relating to the moon, especially eclipse reports, the second to the planets and the recurrence of astronomical phenomena. An appendix contains a list of eclipse dates.
Download or read book Between Greece and Babylonia written by Kathryn Stevens and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on Greece and Babylonia, this book provides a new, cross-cultural approach to the intellectual history of the Hellenistic world.
Download or read book Before Nature written by Francesca Rochberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the modern West, we take for granted that what we call the “natural world” confronts us all and always has—but Before Nature explores that almost unimaginable time when there was no such conception of “nature”—no word, reference, or sense for it. Before the concept of nature formed over the long history of European philosophy and science, our ancestors in ancient Assyria and Babylonia developed an inquiry into the world in a way that is kindred to our modern science. With Before Nature, Francesca Rochberg explores that Assyro-Babylonian knowledge tradition and shows how it relates to the entire history of science. From a modern, Western perspective, a world not conceived somehow within the framework of physical nature is difficult—if not impossible—to imagine. Yet, as Rochberg lays out, ancient investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies clearly established an axis of knowledge between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world. Rochberg is the first scholar to make a case for how exactly we can understand cuneiform knowledge, observation, prediction, and explanation in relation to science—without recourse to later ideas of nature. Systematically examining the whole of Mesopotamian science with a distinctive historical and methodological approach, Before Nature will open up surprising new pathways for studying the history of science.
Download or read book The Star of Bethlehem and Babylonian Astrology written by MR Dag Kihlman and published by Dag Kihlman Publish. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Babylonian magi were famous for their ability to read the skies. They recorded and calculated the movements of the stars and planets, and thus laid the foundations for modern astronomy. However, their former capital, the city of Babylon, was slowly falling into ruin under the rule of the Parthian king, who occupied the country and endorsed the Greek culture. At around the time that Christ was born, the magi read in the night sky that the gods were planning changes: the Parthian king would die, and the dynasty would change. Their divination manual called the agent of this change the king of Amurru, and Amurru was their ancient name for the area from western modern-day Syria down to Israel and Jordan, where the dominant force at the time was the house of Herod. The skies could not tell them that a child would be born, since no such omen was known in their manual. However, the omens heralding the death of the king occurred on two different occasions; the first omen also foretold a very difficult birth, and the second omen was seen nine months later. It is likely that the magi included the birth in their interpretation, since the two omens are in full accordance with the two signs described in Revelation 12 in the Bible.
