Babylon and Uruk – Twin Cities of Celestial Science

Astronomical and astrological cuneiform texts witness to the extraordinary intellectual achievements of Babylonian scholars of the late first millennium BC. This is the result of a process based on celestial observation and mathematical modeling started two millennia earlier.

Babylon and Uruk are the only two Mesopotamian cities in which all types of Late Babylonian astronomical and astrological texts are attested, therefore, their importance lies in their documentation of the knowledge transfer process. The proposed study aims to determine the nature of the local bodies of knowledge through a systematic comparison of the cuneiform sources from all relevant corpora of astral sciences.