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The longest scientific record in history: Babylon's sky-watchers, from the Venus Tablet and the omen-series that founded astrology to the astronomical diaries, the Saros eclipse cycle, and the 360-degree circle...
The longest scientific record in history: Babylon's sky-watchers, from the Venus Tablet and the omen-series that founded astrology to the astronomical diaries, the Saros eclipse cycle, and the 360-degree circle. Their arithmetic passed through Hipparchus and Ptolemy into Greek, Islamic, and modern astronomy.
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Under King Ammisaduqa, Babylonian scribes record the risings and settings of Venus over 21 years. It is the earliest surviving record of systematic planetary observation, the seed of a science that would run for two thousand years.
Babylonian priests compile the Enuma Anu Enlil, a vast series of celestial omens linking events in the heavens to the fate of kings and nations. It is the founding document of astrology, the belief that the sky foretells events on earth.
From the reign of Nabonassar, Babylonian astronomers keep unbroken dated records of the heavens. Centuries later the Greek astronomer Ptolemy would begin his own chronology from this very year, so precious were the Babylonian observations.
Babylonian observers begin the astronomical diaries, nightly records of the moon, planets, weather, river levels, and prices kept for some seven hundred years. They are the longest continuous scientific record in human history.
Babylonian astronomers discover the Saros, a period of about 18 years after which eclipses repeat, letting them predict eclipses in advance. Turning omen-reading into calculation was a decisive step from astrology toward astronomy.
Using their base-60 numbers, Babylonian astronomers divide the circle of the sky into 360 degrees, each degree into 60 minutes of arc, each minute into 60 seconds. Every modern map, clock, and navigation system still uses these Babylonian divisions.
Babylonian astronomers regularize a 19-year cycle in which 7 leap months keep the lunar calendar in step with the solar year. The same cycle, later named for the Greek Meton, still sets the date of the Jewish calendar and of Easter.
Babylonian scholars develop purely mathematical schemes, known to scholars as System A and System B, to compute the future positions of the moon and planets with columns of numbers. It is arithmetic prediction of the heavens, centuries before Greek geometry.
The Babylonian astronomer Kidinnu (known to the Greeks as Cidenas) calculates the length of the year and the moon's motion with an accuracy not matched in Europe until the modern era. His constants passed into Greek astronomy.
The greatest Greek astronomer, Hipparchus, uses centuries of Babylonian eclipse and planetary records to build his own theories, borrowing their arithmetic and their degrees. Babylonian science is the hidden foundation beneath Greek astronomy.
The very last datable cuneiform texts, written when Babylon was already a ruin, are astronomical almanacs. The science of the stars was the final thing the world's oldest written civilization kept recording, outliving its temples and its kings.
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Ptolemy's Almagest, the astronomy textbook of the next 1,400 years, is built in part on Babylonian observations and their base-60 arithmetic. Through it, Babylonian science reached the medieval Islamic and European world and shaped astronomy until Copernicus.