Challenge of the Astronomical Diaries from Babylon

What is it about?

The Astronomical Diaries are a unique corpus of documents from Babylon containing daily observations of celestial and terrestrial phenomena in the last half millennium before the common era. They provide direct information on how Babylonian scholars conducted scientific research and viewed political, economic, and religious events of their time-in other words, how they experienced their era. The book under review is a good introduction to this corpus. This is a review article of: Johannes Haubold, John Steele, and Kathryn Stevens eds., Keeping Watch in Babylon: The Astronomical Diaries in Context. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019.

Featured Image