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FATE
In December 1853, a twenty-seven-year-old archaeologist named Hormuzd Rassam was leading excavations near Mosul, now in Iraq, on behalf of the British Museum in London. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, particularly for someone born and raised in the Middle East. But after more than a year of work, he had yet to make a big discovery, and the spot he was desperate to investigate had been promised to a rival team. He had one last-ditch idea, but the timing had to be perfect. So he watched the desert sky, waiting anxiously for the full moon.
Mosul was Rassam’s home city. Today, it’s known largely as a casualty of the war against terror, left as a pile of rubble and bones after Iraqi forces won it back from ISIS in July 2017. But in Rassam’s time, Mosul was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, with centuries-old brick walls that enclosed dusty streets, crowded bazaars and mosques with bulging domes and soaring minarets. Rickety, flat-bottomed boats ferried passengers across the River Tigris to the fertile land beyond: cornfields; melon and cucumber beds; and a series of shallow grassy hills.
Over the past few years, European adventurers digging in these mounds (and at Nimrud, 30 kilometres south) had revealed a spectacular ancient world. The largest mound, called Kuyunjik, was a mile long. In 1847, the British explorer Austen Henry Layard, with Rassam as his assistant, tunnelled into its southwest corner and unearthed the ruins of a great palace, built in the seventh century BC. The luxurious riverside residence had at least eighty rooms and passages, with stone doorways guarded by huge winged bulls and lions, and walls decorated with around 3 kilometres of carved alabaster friezes, showing victorious military campaigns across the Near East. It belonged to the Assyrian king Sennacherib: Layard and Rassam had discovered the great city of Nineveh, capital of the largest empire the world had ever known.
The Assyrians were famous from the Bible, which tells of Sennacherib’s failed siege of Jerusalem and describes Nineveh as a wicked city whose inhabitants repented after God sent Jonah there to preach. But before Layard’s excavations, no direct trace of this civilisation had ever been found. Now, after more than 2,000 years, its cities and palaces were emerging from the earth.
For a subsequent excavation in 1852, Layard stayed home to pursue a career in politics, persuading the British Museum to put Rassam in charge instead. Keen to prove himself, Rassam planned to investigate the northern corner of the huge Kuyunjik mound, which he was convinced must hold something else spectacular. But Britain and France were jostling for access to antiquities that could be shipped to museums back home, and when Rassam arrived he found that the British consul in Baghdad, Henry Rawlinson, had handed over digging rights of his favoured site to the French.
Rassam dug elsewhere, and by December 1853 his time and funds were running out. He was desperate to explore the site before returning to London, but if he crossed the French and found nothing, the British authorities would likely never trust him again. ‘So I resolved upon an experimental examination of the spot at night,’ he wrote later, ‘and only waited for a good opportunity and bright moonlight for my nocturnal adventure.’
He recruited a team of trusted workmen, and on the night of 20 December led them to Kuyunjik. On the second night, they uncovered part of a marble wall attached to a section of paved floor. The next morning, Rassam excitedly telegraphed Rawlinson and the British Museum with the news that he had discovered another Assyrian palace. But when his team dug further that night, the slabs came to an end after a few feet, surrounded by an ancient rubbish pile.
Rassam was distraught. News of his exploits had already ‘oozed out’ in Mosul, and he feared that the French would soon arrive to stop him, or that the Ottoman authorities would accuse him of looting. On the fourth night, he hired even more men, setting them to work at several sites close to the marble slab. After a few nail-biting hours, he finally heard a shout – ‘Sooar!’ – Arabic for ‘images’. As the men dug a deep trench, a large bank of earth had fallen away, revealing in the moonlight the perfectly preserved image of a muscular, bearded Assyrian king.
The chamber they had discovered turned out to be a long, narrow hall nearly 20 metres long by 5 metres wide. Its walls were covered with scenes of a lion hunt: the king chasing in his chariot, bow held high; spearing a lion with his attendants; thrusting his dagger through the animal’s neck. The reliefs are some of the most exquisite, life-like art ever discovered from the Assyrian civilisation. Rassam was moved by the portrayal of one lioness in particular: ‘resting on her forepaws, with outstretched head she vainly endeavours to gather together her wounded limbs’.
But the biggest discovery was beneath his feet. The floor of this chamber was covered with thousands of broken clay tablets: some completely smashed; others almost whole, up to 9 inches long. Their surfaces were crowded with tiny wedge-shaped indentations – a script known as cuneiform, made by pressing the end of a reed into the clay while it was still wet. Rassam really had discovered another palace – built by Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian empire’s most powerful king. And this was his library.
It was a crucial find. We heard in chapter 2 how the origin of farming, around 8000 BC, was a key turning point in human history: people were no longer part of nature; they were beginning to shape and control it. A few millennia later, these same fertile plains between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers1 witnessed another great human revolution: the invention of writing.
The earliest written tablets known were produced by the Sumerian civilisation of southern Mesopotamia, at the end of the fourth millennium BC. Their cuneiform script was later adopted by the Babylonians and Assyrians and spread further north. By allowing everything from debts and taxes to the will of the king to be permanently recorded, the written word supported the machinery and bureaucracy of ever-more complex cities, states and even empires. And, of course, with written records, history can begin. Archaeological remains can hint at what past cultures thought and believed, but words tell us directly.
Ashurbanipal’s library is the first systematic insight we have into the mental universe of an ancient civilisation. It contained thousands of texts from throughout his empire, which covered all of Mesopotamia and beyond, some of them copies of texts dating back to the third millennium BC. They range from receipts (for oxen, slaves, casks of wine) to prayers to legal documents, literature and medicine: essentially ‘the forerunners of everything’, says Jeanette Fincke, an expert in cuneiform texts who has catalogued the library’s Babylonian tablets at the British Museum. ‘And I honestly mean everything.’
What this archive reveals more than anything, though, is a society built around a fascination – if not an obsession – with the heavens. The tablets describe the movements of the sun, moon and planets as a divine script, carrying messages from the gods which shaped behaviour and decisions in every area of human life. ‘When in the month Ajaru, during the evening watch, the moon eclipses, the king will die,’ reads one tablet, part of a vast compendium of around 7,000 such omens called Enuma Anu Enlil. It’s the birth of an idea that has captivated humanity ever since: that our fate is written in the stars.
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The carvings in Ashurbanipal’s palace depict him as a bloodthirsty ruler; one relief shows him enjoying a picnic in his garden while the severed head of an enemy king hangs from a nearby tree. In 612 BC, a few years after Ashurbanipal’s death, Assyria’s enemies got their revenge. A coalition of former subjects, led by the Babylonians, conquered Nineveh and burned the palaces. The heat of the fire made the clay tablets inside bubble and warp, but also baked them hard enough to survive for thousands of years.
As well as the tablets that Rassam found, Layard unearthed crate-loads more in the palace that Ashurbanipal inherited from Sennacherib. Between them, the excavators shipped tens of thousands of clay fragments to the British Museum.2 Cuneiform tablets had been found before, but the huge scale of the Nineveh finds added urgency to the task of deciphering this strange script.
One of the pioneers was Rawlinson, the British consul. A few years earlier, he had risked his life scaling a cliff face in Persia to copy the mysterious wedge-shaped letters that were carved there as a message to the gods. Repeated in three different languages including the Babylonians’ Akkadian, it was a cuneiform version of the Rosetta Stone. By 1860, he and others had achieved a working knowledge of the complex symbols, and attempts to read the tablets from Nineveh began.
They reveal Ashurbanipal not just as a military leader but as an obsessive collector of texts who worked tirelessly to gather thousands of them from across his empire. He ‘wanted to collect the written knowledge and wisdom of the known world’, says Fincke. One tablet, for example, contains a message from the king to his agents: ‘The rare tablets that are known to you and are not in Assyria. Search for them and bring them to me!’ In particular, he targeted Babylonian texts, collecting more than 3,500 dating back 1,000 years. Although ruled by Assyria since around 900 BC, Babylonia had previously been a powerful empire in its own right. Its capital, Babylon, remained an important cultural and religious centre, and the Assyrians assimilated much of the Babylonian worldview.
One of the most famous finds from the library is the epic Gilgamesh, often described as the world’s first story. Thought to have been written in Babylon around 1700 BC but based on Sumerian poems centuries older, it describes a young, arrogant ruler – inspired by a real king of Uruk from the third millennium BC – who gains wisdom through a desperate, doomed search for immortality. Hailed today as a literary masterpiece, Gilgamesh caused a sensation when it was discovered because it includes a version of the biblical tale of Noah and the Flood, written centuries before the oldest copy of Genesis. (When assistant curator George Smith first deciphered this passage in the Reading Room of the British Museum in November 1872, he reportedly became so excited that he started taking off his clothes.) The poem is also full of celestial references. In one scene, the king has to outrun the sun. In another, he and his friend Enkidu defeat the Bull of Heaven – the constellation we now know as Taurus – set on them by the goddess Ishtar (associated with the planet Venus), and throw its severed thigh in her face. Some scholars think it’s a mythical explanation for why this constellation, by Mesopotamian times, had lost its hindquarters.
Another Babylonian epic from the library is Enuma Elish (‘When on High’). It’s less well known than Gilgamesh but arguably just as significant because it is one of the earliest known creation myths, the oldest surviving attempt to describe how the cosmos came about. It reached its definitive form around 1500 BC, but again was probably based on much older stories. The poem tells how Babylon’s patron god, Marduk (Jupiter), defeats the mother-goddess Tiamat and the forces of chaos. He tears her in half ‘like a dried fish’, and from the two pieces he creates the heavens and the Earth.
Marduk then brings order to the cosmos, setting the paths of the planets and stars and dividing the year into twelve months of thirty days, entrusting the night to the moon and the day to the sun. He unleashes the weather, and causes the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to run from Tiamat’s eyes. Then he builds himself a shrine in Babylon, and, with Ea, the god of water and wisdom, creates humankind. Like other early accounts of how people saw their cosmos, it’s a rich, epic vision, clearly more concerned with creating meaning than explaining facts. Archaeological evidence suggests that the people of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic saw events on the Earth and in the sky as intimately entwined. Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish, dating from the birth of civilisation, reveal a similarly holistic universe in which the terrestrial and celestial reflect and influence each other as two sides of the same coin.
Accordingly, Mesopotamian gods simultaneously inhabited both Earth and sky. Each major divinity existed as a statue in its own home city: Marduk, for example, lived in the Esagila temple in Babylon. Excavations show that the temple was 200 metres long, with huge courtyards leading to an inner shrine, and stood next to a ziggurat, or stepped tower. Priests at the temple attended to Marduk and his divine entourage (also statues), clothing, feeding and entertaining them, and carrying them around the city during religious processions. The twelve-day New Year’s festival was particularly important, during which, says the French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro, ‘the gods were exalted to not only renew time . . . but the universe itself’.
The gods also appeared in the heavens as celestial bodies, with the planets, including Marduk and Ishtar, accompanied by the moon god, Sin, and the sun, Shamash. They were thought capable of determining events on Earth, and through their celestial movements gave clues about what was to come. The priests of the Esagila temple, known as the ‘scribes of Enuma Anu Enlil’, were renowned for their ability to decode heavenly messages, with expertise dating back centuries. By interpreting the signs correctly and carrying out the appropriate rituals, it was possible to avoid any dire predicted consequences.
Ashurbanipal’s motivation in gathering these texts, then, wasn’t purely philosophical. He saw knowledge of the cosmos as vital for his very survival. By far the largest group of Babylonian texts in the king’s library concerns omens and divination, particularly relating to celestial events. His master plan, says Fincke, was ‘to collect as many tablets as possible with instructions for rituals and incantations that were vital to maintain him on his throne and in power’.
Watching the sky wasn’t the only form of divination: pretty much anything could yield messages from the gods, from sheep entrails, birthmarks, smoke or dice, to the call of a particular bird. To avert negative predictions, Babylonians had an arsenal of rituals called namburbi, a Sumerian word that means ‘loosening’ or ‘dispelling’; the evil could be untied like a knot. Like the residents of Çatalhöyük, with its cave-like houses, they inhabited a magical world in which there were no boundaries between the physical and spirit realms, and in which everything was at the will of the gods.
Celestial signs were the most powerful, though. A sign observed privately within the home, such as the sudden appearance of insects, might apply to a single person. An omen visible in the street could cover a whole neighbourhood. But events in the sky could theoretically be witnessed by everyone, so these heralded the fate of the entire country: its harvest, warfare, politics or king. The tablets from the library detail how priests stationed around Ashurbanipal’s empire, but particularly in Babylon, sent him regular reports, with information about the celestial events they had observed and advice on what to do.
Their wisdom was collated in the Enuma Anu Enlil, the title coming from its first words, ‘When Anu and Enlil . . .’ (Anu was god of the heaven or sky; Enlil, god of the atmosphere, was ‘lord of the wind’.) Compiled around the late second millennium BC, it is essentially a handbook covering the earthly consequences of events, from the movements of the planets to the colour of the sun. ‘If on the first day of Nisannu the sunrise [looks] sprinkled with blood,’ reads one tablet, ‘grain will vanish in the country, there will be hardship and human flesh will be eaten.’ Another notes that if a solar eclipse takes place while Venus and Jupiter are visible, ‘the country will be attacked’. Among the most important events were lunar eclipses, which often foretold the death of a king. The moon’s disc was divided into quadrants, corresponding to the four regions of the known world: Amurru, Elam, Assyria and Babylonia. The areas darkened by the eclipse revealed which king was to die.
Letters from Ashurbanipal’s library describe the chilling way in which Mesopotamian kings avoided this fate. If an eclipse was observed, the monarch temporarily abdicated his position, and a substitute – an enemy, criminal, or just the gardener – would be dressed in the king’s robes and placed on the throne with a ‘girl’ or ‘virgin’ beside him as queen. The pair were entertained in luxury for up to a hundred days, enjoying sumptuous banquets, court musicians, and even royal boat trips. Then they were executed, and with the prediction fulfilled, the real king could safely return to his throne.
It’s a fascinating glimpse into a civilisation ruled by the sky, for whom the celestial dance of the sun, moon and planets was literally a matter of life and death. The priests of the Esagila temple weren’t simply superstitious fortune-tellers, however. In 1878, a reclusive Jesuit priest started copying more Babylonian tablets from the British Museum’s vast stores, and helped to reveal that their knowledge of the sky went far beyond what anyone had dreamed.
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After the destruction of Nineveh in 612 BC, the Babylonians inherited control of the Assyrian empire, stretching from what is now central Turkey in the north down to the Arabian desert. King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ascended the throne in 604 BC, spent the forty-three years of his reign rebuilding Babylon, until the city surpassed even its former glory. He built a huge palace, and protected the city with moats and walls so thick you could drive around the top in a four-horse chariot. There were eight gates in the walls, the most impressive of which was the Ishtar Gate, through which a 20-metre-wide processional street led into the city, ending at the Esagila temple. The gate and parade route were lined with glazed blue bricks, decorated with fierce yellow-and-white animals: dragons, lions and aurochs bulls.
Next to the temple, Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt the city’s ziggurat (previously destroyed by Sennacherib), so it was taller than ever before. Thought to have reached 90 metres, it had stairs around the outside and was topped with a shrine to Marduk, again decorated with vibrant blue bricks. The tower was called ‘Etemenanki’ – ‘House of the Foundation of Heaven and the Underworld’ – and was full of mythological and cosmological significance. There’s a clear resonance with the Ark in Gilgamesh: both were divided into seven storeys and covered an area of one ikû, around 90 metres squared.
This structure was reflected in the sky too. Ikû is what the Babylonians called the great square of our modern constellation Pegasus, points out Andrew George, who studies Babylonian culture at SOAS in London. Etemenanki was ‘a structure founded in both levels of the universe at once – one whose hugeness . . . transcends the gap between them’. It was the home of Marduk and the ultimate source of Babylon’s – and the king’s – security and power. In the Bible, for which Nebuchadnezzar is the wicked king who sacked Jerusalem and exiled the Jews, it became the Tower of Babel.
Much of this was confirmed by the German archaeologists who conducted the first scientific excavations of Babylon from 1899. By the time they arrived, however, there were hardly any clay tablets left. These had been removed by Rassam, who dug through large areas of the city in the 1870s, and by local people digging illegally, who sold them to antiquities dealers.3 Thousands of tablets were ultimately bought by the British Museum, where they caught the attention of a trainee priest called Johann Strassmaier.
Born in rural Bavaria in 1846, Strassmaier joined the Jesuits aged nineteen. A few years later, Bavaria became part of the newly united Imperial Germany, and the Jesuits were targeted by Otto von Bismarck, the country’s first chancellor. Bismarck saw their deference to the Pope as a challenge to his secular government, and in 1872 he banned them from teaching or working in Germany. Strassmaier emigrated to a Jesuit college in England, where he specialised in studying languages. He was ordained in 1876, and two years later moved to a Jesuit-owned house in Mayfair, London, walking distance from the British Museum.
But he couldn’t escape the tensions between secular and religious worldviews; scholars in London were clashing over a series of revolutionary scientific discoveries that appeared to undermine ideas in the Bible. In 1859, Charles Darwin had set out his theory of evolution by natural selection, challenging the biblical account of how species were created. Then, in 1872 came the Flood Tablet from Nineveh, causing some to claim that this crucial episode in the Old Testament was simply a reworked Mesopotamian myth. With a strong tradition of academic scholarship and an interest in defending the accuracy of the Bible, the Jesuits wanted to be part of the debate over the finds pouring out of Mesopotamia. Strassmaier was assigned to study cuneiform tablets at the British Museum, and set about teaching himself Akkadian.
Strassmaier was a small man, affable and kind, with a round face and ‘a nose that cannot be easily forgotten’. He originally planned to write a book on the history of the Semitic languages, but was dismayed by the vast number of tablets that lay unread and eroding in the museum’s stores. ‘How can a history of these languages be written,’ he remarked to a colleague, ‘whilst 60,000 cuneiform tablets remain uncopied and untranslated?’ So he embarked on a schedule that he kept for almost twenty years, arriving at the museum’s student room at 10 o’clock each morning and working through until 4 o’clock without any breaks. In that time, he copied the symbols from thousands of tablets, producing neat ink drawings on A4 sheets of paper folded in half. Whereas curator George Smith had read texts from Nineveh, Strassmaier focused on the tablets coming out of Babylon. They mostly dated from the time after Nebuchadnezzar, between the fifth to the first centuries BC, during which the city fell to the Persians and then to the Greeks.
At first, Strassmaier diligently copied economic records such as bills and contracts, the texts most scholars thought too boring to bother with. But he soon noticed large numbers of tablets with few words, just numbers. What text there was – planet names, for example – hinted that the subject matter was astronomical. The numbers made no sense to Strassmaier, so in 1880 he asked fellow priest Joseph Epping, who had been his maths teacher in Germany and was now based in the Netherlands, for help. Epping was reluctant at first. He couldn’t read cuneiform, and though astronomy was ‘not totally alien’ to him, he wrote later, the task seemed too daunting: ‘I did not believe to be such a computational artist, that I could solve an equation, that had so large a number of unknowns, and so little a number of knowns.’ But Strassmaier handed over his drawings, and eventually Epping started wrestling with the mystery numbers, looking for patterns that might reveal their meaning.
He started on a fragment with seven columns of numbers that cycled up and down. It took him months to make sense of it. As Epping worked, other cuneiform scholars were just getting an inkling of the Babylonians’ facility with mathematics, using a number system based on 60 (which we reprise every time we write a time in hours, minutes and seconds, or an angle in degrees) to tackle algebra, fractions and even quadratic equations. But still, what he found was a bolt from the blue.
In 1881, Epping announced that the numbers represent steps in a calculation of the dates and times of a series of new moons, covering the years 104–101 BC. Another text included a similar table for the positions of Venus and Jupiter. The calculations were impressively accurate, even taking account of subtle variations in the apparent speed of the moon and planets through the sky (caused by their elliptical orbits). Although Greek and Roman writers often refer to the Babylonians’ astral wisdom, no one had expected that alongside their magical omens and prayers, the scribes of Marduk developed a new type of mathematical knowledge about the cosmos. Epping called his discovery a ‘precious historical treasure’. The priests really could foretell the future, using accurate formulas to predict celestial events decades in advance.
As more tablets have been catalogued and read, historians can now trace a gradual progression in the priests’ abilities. Enuma Anu Enlil, the handbook found in Ashurbanipal’s library, contains a series of omens that list risings and settings of Venus,4 dated to the second millennium BC. Some of the numbers seem to be based on observations but others have been corrected to fit a pattern. The scheme isn’t very accurate, but shows that the Babylonians were already trying to describe the heavens using mathematical rules. The later tablets from Babylon (and also some written by temple priests in the city of Uruk) show that from around the eighth century BC, the priests started keeping more systematic records, watching the sky each night and writing down everything they saw. These ‘astronomical diaries’ also include notable terrestrial events, from the level of the Euphrates river or prices of wool, barley and sesame, to reports of monstrous births.
Within a few generations, the scribes started to notice ‘great cycles’: periods after which particular types of event roughly repeat. Ishtar repeats her wandering path after 8 years, for example, and Marduk after 71 years, while eclipses follow an 18-year cycle. By checking what had happened during previous great cycles they could monitor signs in the sky without even needing to watch.
Then, around 400 BC, came another jump in sophistication. The priests invented the zodiac by dividing the ecliptic (the path through the sky followed by the sun, moon and planets) into 12 equal segments of 30 degrees, naming each one after a nearby constellation, such as ‘Bull of Heaven’ (now Taurus) and ‘Great Twins’ (Gemini). This gave them an accurate system for recording and computing events in the sky. Shortly afterwards, they came up with arithmetic methods to describe the repeating cycles recorded in their diaries.
These were based on finding ‘period relations’, which express different astronomical cycles in terms of one another. For example, each planet moves around the zodiac at a characteristic speed (its ‘tropical cycle’), but superimposed on this is a zigzag pattern in which it sometimes stops or temporarily reverses direction (its ‘synodic cycle’).5 Venus can be described pretty well by a very simple relation – in eight years, it goes through eight tropical cycles and (almost exactly) five synodic cycles – while others are far more complex. The final step was to incorporate the subtle variations in speed that occur throughout these cycles, by adding or subtracting different values over time according to set rules.6
It’s very clever maths, says historian of astronomy James Evans. The scribes no longer needed to rely on long lists of past observations, just a small set of numerical parameters to define the behaviour of each celestial event.7 Epping had uncovered the moment when humanity transitioned from simply experiencing phenomena in the sky to explaining them.
And that wasn’t the only surprise hidden in the crumbling clay.
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In 336 BC, more than 1,600 kilometres northwest of Babylonia, a young prince called Alexander ascended the Macedonian throne. Over the next five years he carved out a huge empire, winning Greek states, then Asia Minor, then Egypt. And in October 331 BC, after a decisive battle against Persian forces on the plains near Nineveh, he marched his armies to Babylon.
According to the later Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, while many of the inhabitants climbed the city walls to watch Alexander the Great arrive, most went out to meet him as he approached the blue-glazed gate. Officials carpeted the ceremonial road with flowers, and lined it with silver altars, heaped with perfume. They sent out gifts – herds of cattle and horses; lions and leopards in cages – and showed off their cultural treasures with a procession of musicians, wise men and the scribes of Enuma Anu Enlil. Surrounded by his armed guard, Alexander entered the gate by chariot and went straight to the royal palace. Taken by the city’s beauty and antiquity, he made it his new capital. His victory ushered Babylon into the Greek world – and brought the scribes into contact with the astronomers and philosophers of the west. Their two views of the cosmos could not have been more different.
Whereas the temple priests saw celestial events as written on a flat tablet, Greek scholars were interested in three dimensions; they wanted to know how the solar system was arranged. And while the Babylonian belief in omens meant precision mattered above all else, the Greeks had little tradition of accurately observing the sky. They based their models on lofty, philosophical ideals.
In the fourth century BC, the dominant figure in Greek thinking was Alexander’s tutor, Aristotle. His fundamental assumption was that since the heavens are divine, they must be structured in the appropriately perfect and efficient way: a series of spheres. He proposed a spherical Earth at the centre of the cosmos, surrounded by concentric circles or spheres that carried the orbits of the sun, moon, five known planets and fixed stars. The only imaginable heavenly motion was constant speed in a perfect circle, but that couldn’t explain why the planets sometimes stop and change direction. In the third century BC, western astronomers came up with an elegant solution: the planets move in small circles, called epicycles, at the same time as tracing a larger loop around the Earth. Off-centre orbits were suggested to explain the varying speed of the moon and sun. These geometric theories included no accurate numbers; the principle was what mattered. Until the second century BC, that is, when an astronomer named Hipparchus changed everything.
Born around 190 BC, Hipparchus worked on the island of Rhodes and seems to have conducted a one-man revolution of Greek astronomy, essentially transforming this philosophical art into a practical science. He made extensive astronomical observations, and is credited with compiling the first star catalogue. He also slated his peers for their sloppiness, arguing that their models of the cosmos were useless if they didn’t accurately match what happened in the sky. His attitude, according to James Evans, ‘represented a radically new way of regarding the world – at least among the Greeks’. Hardly any of Hipparchus’s work survives directly, but the later mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy reports that Hipparchus used astronomical observations to derive accurate numbers – period relations – to describe the cyclic behaviour of the sun, moon and planets. Then he used the new maths of trigonometry (and possibly even invented it; Hipparchus was the first we know of to use such techniques) to plug these numbers into the existing geometric models.
‘Hipparchus turned a broadly explanatory geometric model into a real theory,’ says Evans. He wasn’t able to fully explain the motions of the planets using Aristotle’s perfect circles. But for the first time, the Greeks could calculate the position of the sun or moon in the zodiac for any given date.
The next great astronomer of the ancient Greek world was Ptolemy. Working in Alexandria in the second century AD, he built on Hipparchus’s work in a monumental text, the Almagest, in which he set out a logical, mathematical explanation for all the movements seen in the sky, derived step by step from observations. It included the planetary theory that eluded Hipparchus: Ptolemy suggested that epicycles move through the sky at a constant speed not as seen from Earth or from the centre of their orbit but from a third point, which he called ‘the equant’. Though complicated, this scheme was impressively accurate, and the Almagest proved to be one of the most influential science books ever written, defining a view of the cosmos that lasted for 1,500 years.
For much of recent history, then, this chain of events was thought to explain the origin not just of western astronomy but of scientific thinking in general, part of the so-called ‘Greek miracle’, as Evans puts it, ‘as if the Greeks had in one swoop invented science, along with history, poetry and democracy’. But in 1900, Epping’s colleague and successor, Franz Kugler, read something unexpected in the Babylonian tablets, the full significance of which would not be realised for many decades to come.
Kugler, from a landowning family in Königsbach, Bavaria, was square-jawed, determined and difficult. Another ex-student of Epping, he was appointed as maths professor at a Jesuit college in the Netherlands, and taught himself Akkadian in order to take over analysis of Strassmaier’s drawings in 1897, a few years after Epping died. He had a strained relationship with Strassmaier, complaining that his colleague’s frequent linguistic suggestions were not helpful for his astronomical analysis. He was also a scathing critic of ‘Panbabylonism’, a school of thought that emerged in the late nineteenth century which argued that the Hebrew Bible was directly derived from Babylonian culture and mythology, and that the Babylonians had developed highly sophisticated astronomy as early as the third millennium BC.
It was Kugler who worked out much of the detail of the astronomical theories that Epping had unearthed. And he noticed something odd about the period relations that the Babylonians used to calculate the behaviour of the moon.
This was the priests’ most complex theory. To fully describe the moon and predict all-important lunar eclipses, they had to combine several different lunar cycles: the moon’s variation in speed (anomalistic month); progression through its phases (synodic month); and the time it takes to travel between the ‘nodes’ where it crosses the sun’s path (draconitic month). To do this, the Babylonians ultimately used a cycle of nearly 350 years, from which they derived the average length of the synodic month as precisely 29.5306 days.8 Kugler noticed that the numbers in this theory were identical to those used by Hipparchus. In other words, Hipparchus didn’t derive the numbers in his theories from observations at all. He took them from the astronomers in Babylon.
In fact, over the last few decades it has emerged that pretty much all of the numbers on which Hipparchus’s theories were based, including his period relations for the planets, come from Babylonian tablets. Historians already knew that some aspects of Babylonian maths and astronomy had filtered to the Greeks, including the zodiac signs and the base-60 number system (which Hipparchus was one of the very first Greeks to use). But the Babylonians were still seen as primitive stargazers, inferior to the scientifically minded Greeks. The French Assyriologist George Bertin, for example, responding to Epping and Strassmaier’s findings in 1889, insisted that even if the Greeks had adopted some of the priests’ terminology, it was the Babylonians who had learned astronomy from the Greeks: ‘The Babylonians . . . soon discovered the accuracy of their new masters in science.’
The discovery of Hipparchus’s numbers embedded in older Babylonian models turns that view upside down, proving that the fundamental ingredients for his theories came from the temple tablets. More evidence is still being uncovered. In 2017, Australian researchers claimed that a Babylonian tablet from the second millennium BC contains a trigonometric table: perhaps the priests helped to inspire Hipparchus’s invention of trigonometry too. Hipparchus’s reliance on Babylonian astronomy is so extensive, in fact, some scholars think he must have visited the Esagila temple himself and worked with the priests there, copying observations and equations from their tablets and converting them into Greek. More than that, contact with the priests may have transformed his very approach. After the hand-waving philosophical discussions back home, Hipparchus must have been ‘shocked’, says Evans, to discover that the Babylonians were accurately predicting future positions of the sun, moon and planets in the sky. No wonder he made it his mission to make the Greek models just as precise.
In Hipparchus, then, two opposing worldviews collided. The Babylonian arithmetic progressions yielded precise predictions but included no three-dimensional structure, while the Greeks had geometric models but no accurate numbers. Neither approach on its own could produce a complete description of the sky. When they came together, the science of astronomy was born.
Of course, that wasn’t all the Babylonians helped to forge. Entwined with astronomy from the beginning was the parallel discipline of astrology.
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In September 1967, French archaeologists excavating near a Roman sanctuary at Grand in northeast France found broken fragments of ivory at the bottom of an ancient well. Along with pottery, jewellery, fruit stones and shoes, the team eventually recovered nearly 200 pieces from two pairs of ivory tablets, smashed and discarded around AD 170. Their surfaces still hold traces of gold leaf and coloured paint, and they’re beautifully carved with a circle of figures still intimately familiar today, from a crab and scorpion to two scaly fish. They were used for casting horoscopes.
Before Alexander conquered Babylon, the Greeks had plenty of ways to foretell the future, from dream specialists to temple oracles, but there was no particular tradition of reading someone’s fate in the sky. Without the ability to calculate the positions of the sun, moon and stars, the idea of casting a horoscope simply didn’t exist. But some time in the second century BC, after contact with Babylon, a craze for astrology swept through the Greek and Roman world. It reached throughout the Roman Empire but was particularly popular in Greco-Roman Egypt. Elaborate zodiacs start appearing on Egyptian temple ceilings, and papyrus fragments found in ancient rubbish dumps have yielded hundreds of briefly scrawled horoscopes, noting details of the sky at the moment of a person’s birth. James Evans suggests these were astrologers’ notes, summarising information about a client that would be displayed during a consultation on a board like the tablets from Grand. These have portraits of the sun and moon carved in the centre, surrounded by a zodiac circle. Around that are thirty-six decans, groups of stars that the ancient Egyptians used to divide up the sky.
A narrative poem called the Alexander Romance (a fictional version of Alexander the Great’s life, which exists in several versions and originates from the second century AD) includes a passage describing how a similar tablet was used. In the story, the last native Egyptian pharaoh, Nectanebo II, travels to the Macedonian court after being defeated by the Persians, posing as an astrologer as part of an elaborate plan to trick Queen Olympias – who would later give birth to Alexander – into sleeping with him. He tells the queen that the horoscope reveals a ram-horned god will visit her during the night; Nectanebo subsequently disguises himself as this deity. During the consultation, Nectanebo uses a ‘princely and costly board’ made of ivory, ebony, gold and silver, decorated just like the Grand tablets. He opens a small ivory case and carefully pours out gemstones to represent the celestial bodies – crystal for the sun, sapphire for Venus, a blood-red stone for Mars – placing them on the board to show their positions in the heavens at the moment of the queen’s birth. In Greco-Roman times, wealthy clients probably had such consultations in temples and sanctuaries, says Evans. For everyone else, street astrologers may have cast horoscopes in squares and markets, drawing their charts in sand trays or on the ground.
The inspiration for astrology based on birth charts and zodiac signs – the kind we recognise today, popular in New Age websites and self-help books – is often credited to the ancient Egyptians; classical writers say it was invented by a seventh-century pharaoh called Nechepso. Greek astrology did incorporate traditional Egyptian elements – not least groups of stars called decans, originally used to tell time at night – and added features such as the ‘horoscopic point’, the part of the ecliptic rising at the time of birth after which the entire chart was named. But as with mathematical astronomy, the fundamental ingredients of western astrology come from Marduk’s priests.
Since around 400 BC, the Babylonian scribes had been branching out. Instead of just giving predictions for king and country, they made forecasts for individuals based on the position of celestial bodies in the sky at the time of birth. Epping and Kugler deciphered the first Babylonian ‘horoscopes’; a few dozen are now known. One of the earliest, dating from 410 BC, records the birth of a child on the fourteenth night of the month Nisannu, when Jupiter was in Pisces, Venus in Taurus, and the moon was beneath the ‘Horn’ of the Scorpion (the stars of our constellation Libra). ‘Things will be good for you,’ the tablet says.
While the Babylonians’ astronomical techniques enabled Greek astrology, the desire to study horoscopes was in turn a key motivation for Greek astronomers. Hipparchus wrote a now-lost treatise on astrology, with the historian Pliny the Elder remarking that he ‘can never be sufficiently praised, no one having done more to prove that man is related to the stars and that our souls are a part of heaven’. Ptolemy was also an advocate. Alongside the Almagest, he wrote another epic and hugely influential work, Tetrabiblos, in which he summarised the methods of astrology and tried to arrange them in a logical system. Personal qualities ‘which concern the reason and the mind are apprehended by means of the condition of Mercury’, he wrote, ‘and the qualities of the sensory and irrational part are discovered from . . . the moon.’ Ptolemy’s approach differed from the Babylonians in that rather than seeing celestial signs as divine warnings, he believed powers emanating from stars and planets, such as ‘humoral shifts’, could trigger effects on Earth, influencing everything from the weather to personality and health. But he too was driven to achieve mathematical accuracy at least partly because he wanted to read human secrets in the stars.
It took more than a thousand years before scholars in western Europe superseded Ptolemy’s system and constructed our modern, heliocentric view of the heavens. In 1543, Copernicus suggested that the sun, not the Earth, is at the centre of the cosmos, a theory supported by Galileo when he turned his telescope skywards and found, for example, that Venus has phases like the moon. Then, in 1609, Johannes Kepler banished epicycles and equants when he realised that celestial orbits are not circular but elliptical.
For these founding fathers of astronomy, the idea that the stars influence our fate was still embedded in their motivation and world-view. Galileo regularly made astrological predictions for rich clients, and drew up horoscopes for his illegitimate daughters. Kepler hoped to strengthen and reform the discipline, describing himself as ‘throwing out the chaff and keeping the grain’. He discounted the idea that cultural inventions like names or zodiac signs could affect earthly events. But he firmly believed that different qualities of light from the various planets could influence climate and health, and he suggested that just like human beings, the Earth has a soul, sensitive to the harmonies of the stars.
Ultimately, though, astrology was incompatible with the scientific revolution. In 1641, the French philosopher René Descartes famously separated mind from body, consciousness from the material world – part of an inexorable shift in the West towards physical causation as the only acceptable type of explanation. Astronomy and astrology had to go their separate ways: the former making sense of the universe based on objective measurements; the latter emphasising intangible connections and subjective meaning. There could only be one winner. Without an obvious physical mechanism by which distant celestial bodies might affect our lives, the intellectual standing of astrology slowly collapsed.
While scientific astronomy soared, astrology was left to ‘stumble along’, as Nicholas Campion, director of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture at the University of Wales, puts it: ‘a system that is dislocated from its cosmology’. For many scientists, it’s a threat that needs stamping out. In the UK, celebrity physicist Brian Cox has described astrology as ‘undermining the very fabric of our civilisation’, while biologist and sceptic Richard Dawkins complains that it is ‘shrivelling and cheapening the universe’.
And yet despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of scientific support, the interest in zodiac signs and horoscopes persists. In fact, astrology is now reportedly rising in credibility and popularity, particularly among millennials seeking guidance, escape and even ambiguity in a stressful, ultra-rational world. Astronomy and astrology might seem complete opposites, even enemies. But in a way they are twins, reflecting two essential sides of our nature, and born of the same fundamental human desire to see patterns, order and meaning in the sky.
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In February 323 BC, Alexander once again approached Babylon with his army. The city’s envoys included an astronomer-priest, Bel-apla-iddina, who warned him that, according to the celestial omens, his life was in danger if he entered the city. The details given by different ancient writers vary: according to one, the priest advised that Alexander should approach Babylon facing east, to avoid catching sight of the setting sun. But the marshy terrain was too difficult for his troops, so the king turned back, and arrived facing westwards after all.
Once in Babylon, Alexander made plans for his next military campaigns – he wanted to attack Arabia in the south, Carthage and Italy in the west. Several Greek and Roman writers recount a story that in May that year, while the king was away from his throne – Diodorus says he went for a massage; Plutarch says he was exercising – an escaped prisoner entered the palace, crowned himself and sat on the empty chair. Alexander’s Babylonian advisers told him to put the man to death. The classical authors seem mystified by this strange event. But recent scholars have suggested that the priests, concerned for Alexander’s life, may have tried to enact the substitute king ritual to save him.
A few weeks later, Alexander attended a drinking party and afterwards fell seriously ill. An astronomical diary for the evening of 11 June 323 BC is the only contemporary record of what happened next. ‘The king died,’ wrote the scribe. ‘Clouds.’
Aged just thirty-three, the career of one of the world’s greatest generals was over and the city’s fate was sealed. Alexander had made Babylon his capital, and was rebuilding Marduk’s temple and the Etemenanki tower. But after his death, his kingdom was split between his generals. Seleucos, who took Mesopotamia, built himself a new capital and forced Babylon’s citizens to move there. Only the priests stayed, diligently recording their nightly observations in the abandoned city.
The region was next conquered in 125 BC by the Parthians from modern-day Iran, and shortly afterwards was subsumed into the Roman Empire. Within a few centuries, Babylon, like the great cities of Nineveh and Uruk, lay buried under the sand, forgotten until the nineteenth-century exploits of Layard and Rassam. It was the end of humanity’s first civilisation, a flourishing of armies and empires, temples and towers, myths and magic, which created many of the foundations from which our own society is built. Its dying breath – the very last cuneiform tablets ever found – date from the first century AD. They are astronomical almanacs, forecasting future events in the sky.
As far as we can tell, people have recognised star constellations and followed the annual cycles of the sun, moon and stars as far back as the Palaeolithic. By the Neolithic, they were starting to shape their cosmos, building monuments to create and capture key moments and effects. But the ability to keep written records – and the administrative system that writing supported – offered the opportunity to vastly extend that control. In a centuries-long effort, the Babylonians transformed a wandering, whimsical sky, plaything of the gods, into a predictable, mathematical universe.
Many civilisations through history have developed mathematical models to describe the sky. Chinese emperors employed teams of astronomers to draw up sky maps and predict events such as eclipses. The Mayans, whose leaders associated themselves with heavenly bodies, counted celestial cycles that lasted millions of years. But the scribes of Enuma Anu Enlil were the first we know of to move from an analogue cosmos to a digital one; the first to swap the messy complexity of reality for the simplicity and power of numbers.
1 Mesopotamia, from the Greek for ‘land between the rivers’, stretched from southern Turkey down to the Persian Gulf.
2 Rassam and Layard didn’t record where they found the different tablets, and the crates became mixed up further after arrival in London, so they are all now treated as one collection.
3 As at Nineveh, the find-spots of these tablets weren’t recorded, and many of them were damaged during recovery and transport. By the time the German team started work, barely any clay tablets were left.
4 Its first appearance before sunset and last appearance before sunrise.
5 This is because Earth and the other planets are all orbiting the sun. Mercury and Venus are closer to the sun, so they always appear close to it in the sky. When they move behind the sun (as seen from Earth) they appear to be going backwards. The other planets (Mars, Saturn, Jupiter) are further from the sun than we are, so sometimes we overtake them on the inside.
6 Rather than tracking celestial bodies through the zodiac, the priests were most interested in computing the times and positions of key events – such as a new moon or lunar eclipse, or the moment at which a planet stops or changes direction – as these were what triggered omen predictions.
7 Researchers are still finding surprises in the tablets. In 2016, historian Mathieu Ossendrijver found that the priests were using geometric techniques in their astronomy too. He reported a Babylonian tablet that recorded a calculation of the distance Jupiter had travelled using a method equivalent to plotting its velocity against time and then calculating the area under the graph. This method was previously thought to have been invented by European astronomers in the fourteenth century AD.
8 Instead of a decimal number system, the Babylonians used a sexagesimal system with sixty as its base (as we still use for degrees and time today). Both the Babylonians and Hipparchus used exactly the same figure of 29;31,50,8,20 days, which converts to 29.5306 days (29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes). The modern value is also 29.5306 days.
