Stars over Ancient Babylon

New Babylonian (Chaldean) empire, 626 - 539 BC

— Figure 1: Revolutions of empires. —

— Figure 2: Important Neo-Babylonian kings. —

— Figure 3: Babylon. Drawn by Rachel Magruder. —

The Babylonian ruler Nabopolassar defeated the Assyrian empire in 612 BC, ushering in the New Babylonian period.

The New Babylonian empire reached its zenith with Nebuchadnezzar’s defeat of the Egyptians at Carchemish in 605 BC. Returning home, Nebuchadnezzar took Hebrew captives with him to Babylon, as told in the Book of Daniel. In 587 BC he returned to Palestine to crush Jerusalem, forcing the Jewish people into exile.

For 600 years, beginning in this era, the Scribes of Enuma Anu Enlil maintained a continuous series of Astronomical Diaries. In these diaries they recorded observations of the Moon, planets, heliacal risings of stars and other phenomena.

Explore a diary tablet at the British Museum.

A typical diary entry might take this form: “In year x of King y, month z, day n, Mars reached its first stationary point; it was in zodiacal sign z.”

Other records explicitly correlated celestial events with meteorology, economics, politics and warfare, or other potential omens:

Kidinnu: “If you want to make a prediction of the market price of barley, notice the movement of the planets. If you observe the first visibilities, the last visibilities, the stationary points, the conjunctions, ... the faint and bright light of the planets and zodiacal signs and their positive or negative latitude... your prediction for the coming year will be correct.”

The scribes collected observations on a scale not seen again until the statistical and economic surveys of modern states in the 18th-19th centuries. As historian of astronomy Noel Swerdlow explains:

“Their systematic observation and recording of phenomena ... has remained to this day the longest and most comprehensive program of astronomical observation ever carried out.... extending from the 8th or the 7th to the 1st century, ... the longest continuous scientific research of any kind in all of history, for modern science itself has existed for only half as long.”(1)

Notes and References

1. (Text) - 1. Noel Swerdlow, The Babylonian Theory of the Planets, p. 17.

Exhibit credit: Kerry Magruder.