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During the 1870s and early 1880s, numerous clay tablets from Babylonian archaeological sites found their way to antique dealers in Baghdad. The tablets had been found in the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, where they had once formed part of the royal archive in the most famous library in the ancient Near East. The library was built by King Assurbanipal, who reigned during Assyria’s ascendancy in the eighth century BC. This historical treasure was preserved for future scholars when a combined force of Medes and Chaldeans sacked Nineveh in 612 BC destroying the library completely and burying the royal archive in the process.

The Babylonian empire was situated between the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, in an area historically known as Mesopotamia – the ‘land between two rivers’. Flowing south-eastward, the rivers converge to form a single valley, then proceed in parallel channels for the greater part of their course. Finally, they unite shortly before reaching the Persian Gulf. The joint delta of these rivers forms a plain about 275 km long. As in Egypt with the Nile, the delta offered many advantages to early people, continually attracting settlements for thousands of years. The fertile valley yielded abundant harvests, workable clay and the nutritious fruit of the date palm. Though large stone deposits were lacking, the early settlers used the local clay for building and even for writing material.

Figure 2.1. The Near East: Mesopotamia, the valley ‘between the two rivers’.

Wars were frequent in ancient Mesopotamia as tribes of hunters from the northern mountains and herdsmen from the south often tried to conquer this rich land. The Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants for whom there are written records, had entered the region by 3700 BC and gradually settled down to a life of farming. The Sumerians are credited with developing the earliest known form of writing.

In the 1880s, the British Museum purchased virtually all the clay tablets from Baghdad via London antique dealers. It was soon realised that among this vast collection were stories of the creation of the world and the great flood, as well as thousands of short texts on mathematics and astronomy. The latter texts contained records of astronomical observations made over hundreds of years in Assyria and Babylonia, and dating back to the third millennium BC. Today over a hundred and thirty thousand of these tablets are still stored at the Museum. It is an astonishing collection that comprises at least 98 per cent of all extant records of Babylonian astronomy.

One set of seventy tablets from Nineveh revealed a vast programme of astronomical observations which had been carried out in the second millennium BC. Known from its opening words as Enuma Anu Enlil (‘When Heaven and Earth …’), the set is a list, compiled over centuries, of celestial omens believed to have been sent to the king from the gods, warning him of impending disasters. Most of the tablets deal with interpretations of lunar and solar eclipses, conjunctions of planets, and comets, which the Babylonians took as dangerous omens.