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E: Late Mesopotamian Constellations
10: Late Babylonian constellation depiction
VAT 7847, Obverse.
VAT 7847, Obverse. Constellation depiction on a Seleucid astrological tablet (from 2nd-century BCE Uruk). The depiction shows a lion standing on the back of a winged serpent. The two constellations depicted are Hydra and Leo. (They are shown "from the other side" - facing left instead of right.) The eight-pointed star to the left is captioned dingirSAG.ME.GAR (Jupiter). (However, some persons have mistakenly identified the bright star as Procyon.)
VAT 7847 is a part of a larger tablet that had broken into two parts. The join for VAT 7847 appeared in Textes cunéiformes du Louvre by François Thureau-Dangin, Tome XII (Tablettes d'Uruk, à l'usage des prêtres du temple d'Anu au temps des Séleucides), 1922, catalogued as AO 6448. VAT 7847 is in the State Museum, Berlin, and AO 6448 is in the Louvre Museum, Paris. As a completed tablet VAT 7847 and AO 6448 form an astrological calendar. The tablet depicts 12 divisions corresponding to the months and the signs of the zodiac and is concerned with lunar eclipses near zodiacal constellations. The tablet is dated to circa 200 BCE and originates from Uruk.
Drawing of VAT 7847, Obverse.
The Mul.Apin series contains the earliest (surviving) full description of the Mesopotamian constellation. Its detailed constellation material dates to the late 2nd-millennium BCE.
The identification of the stars forming the Mesopotamian scheme of constellations is fairly certain for the zodiacal belt but becomes increasingly uncertain the further we move to the north or south of such. There are five tablets (comprising three types of sources) which aid our understanding, both descriptive and graphic, of how the Babylonians visualised the constellations.
Two tablets are descriptive sources. Several of the constellations, including the Twins (mul.mas.tab.ba.gal.gal.la), Perseus (mul.su.gi), Cancer (mul.al.lu5), and Ursa Major (mul.mar.gid.da), are described star by star in an incomplete text (VAT 9428, a Neo-Assyrian text) from Assur. The complete text originally contained a systematic star by star description of the Babylonian constellations. Effectively the text describes how to draw the constellations. (VAT 9428 was first discussed by the Assyriologist Ernst Weidner in "Eine Beschreibung des Sternenhimmels aus Assur." (AfO, Band 4, 1927, Pages 73-85).) Paul-Alain Beaulieu recently (American Oriental Society, 209th Meeting, 1999) discussed two similar genre texts, both unpublished and both fragmentary, in the Yale Babylonian Collection. The larger text, dated to the year 97 of the Seleucid period, is MLC 1866, and the smaller fragment, undated but believed to also be from the Hellenistic period, is YBC 7831.
A recently identified Babylonian text (the GU text on BM 78161) describing lines of stars in the sky (perhaps meridian or azimuth related) describes that the Arrow star (Sirius) was visualised as being fired by a human-figure, having an elbow and foot, from the Bow at Orion ("the faithful shepherd of Anu"). (BM 78161 dates between the seventh and fifth centuries BCE.) The tablet, though acquired by the British Museum in the late 19th-century, was only identified as being a star-list circa 1985 during preparation for the 8th volume of the British Museum's Catalogue of Babylonian Tablets. (In their book Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia (1999) Hermann Hunger and David Pingree explain that the Babylonian GU text arranges stars in so-called "strings" that lie along declination circles and therefore measure right-ascensions or time intervals, and the GU text also employs the stars of the zenith (ziqpu stars), which are also separated by given differences in right-ascension.)
Three tablets are graphic sources. One graphic representation is a fragmentary Assyrian "planisphere" (K 8538) recovered from the library of King Assurbanipal in Nineveh. Remaining on it are schematic drawings of six stars and constellations (i.e., the constellations depicted in each sector are drawn as dots (representing stars) connected by lines). Two astrological tablets from 2nd-century BCE Uruk are our only source of actual constellation drawings. (One of these tablets is in two fragments and is formed from VAT 7847 and AO 6448.) One of the two tablets (VAT 7851) shows the Pleiades, Moon and Taurus. The other of the two tablets (VAT 7847) (obverse side) shows Jupiter, Hydra and Leo. The constellation depiction on AO 6448 (forming the reverse side of the completed VAT 7847 + AO 6448 tablet) shows Mercury, Virgo and Corvus (the Raven) (standing on the tail of Hydra).
A Ziqpu-Star Planisphere from Sippar, dated to the 1st millennium BCE, largely preserves on the outer ring of its obverse side both star-names and dots (representing the stars comprising the ziqpu-star constellations.). See: "Tablets From the Sippar Library IX. A Ziqpu-Star Planisphere." by Horowitz and Al-Rawi (Iraq, Volume LXIII, 2001).
Additionally, the Bull of Heaven (Taurus) is drawn on an esoteric tablet dated to the Seleucid era. See: Textes cunéiformes du Louvre by François Thureau-Dangin, Tome VI (Tablettes d'Uruk, à l'usage des prêtres du temple d'Anu au temps des Séleucides), (Plate 91), 1922. (The plate is reproduced in Astrological Reports to Assyrian Kings by Hermann Hunger (1992), Page 40.)
"[W]e can test the extent to which some Babylonian constellations taken over by the Greeks retained their original shapes by comparing the data in the GU text with those in Ptolemy's star catalogue (Almagest VII-VIII)" (Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia by Hermann Hunger and David Pingree (1999, Page 97). (The GU text (BM 78161) containing star names, likely recovered from Babylon or Sippar and dating between the 7th- and 5th-century BCE, is divided into 20 sections by the Sumerian word GU (meaning "string") which concludes each section of text (written on both obverse and reverse sides of the tablet).) The Mesopotamian arrangement of constellations has survived to the present day because it became the basis of a numerical reference scheme - the ecliptic.
Copyright © 2001-2008 by Gary D. Thompson
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