Abstract
Uruk seems hardly to have been known in the broader Greco-Roman world except in rather specialized circles. A version of its Greek name occurs in Ptolemy’s Geography and his Handy Tables . The people of Uruk, the Orchenoi or Orchenioi , also show up in the Geography, as well as in the astrological geography of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, where Ptolemy associates astronomy with three peoples, Babylonians, Chaldaioi and Orchenoi, though apparently in his eyes the Babylonians were somehow more exotic, while the Chaldaioi and Orchenoi were more ‘people like us’. Pliny and Strabo also know the Orchenoi primarily as practitioners of astral science. A recently discovered papyrus fragment, P.Oxy. astr. 4139, takes us beyond these literary references by associating the Orchenoi with specific doctrines in mathematical lunar theory.
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Notes
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- 4.
For discussion and an edition of the Table of Noteworthy Cities, see Stückelberger et al. (2009).
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The descriptions of the course of the Euphrates in Book 5, Chaps. 18 and 20 are marred by corruptions. Ptolemy evidently provided either the branch of the river through Babylon or the one through Seleukeia with the additional name ‘Royal River’ (Βασίλειος ποταμός). The edition of Stückelberger et al. adopts the latter alternative, but I suspect that the Royal River was in fact the river through Babylon . At 5.18.8 I suggest reading ὧν ὁ μὲν (μεταξὺ codd.) καλεῖται Βασίλειος ποταμός, and at 5.20.2 I would delete the first καί.
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Steele (2015).
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Parker (1959).
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A related, anonymous eclipse omen text is published in Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum v. 7, 129–149.
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For a schematic diagram of Ptolemy’s system in the Tetrabiblos, see Heilen (2015: 324).
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Orchenia is specified as an affected place for ominous phenomena in three passages of Ioannes Lydus’s De Ostentis (Sect. 25, 56, and 71 in Wachsmuth’s 1897 edition). But Lydus’s geographical lists are obviously derived from the Tetrabiblos (with the addition of a curious ‘Antorchenia’ as an alternative to Orchenia ).
- 13.
- 14.
Jones (1999: 1.97–99, 2.22–23).
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Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 269804.
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Jones, A. (2019). Uruk and the Greco-Roman World. In: Proust, C., Steele, J. (eds) Scholars and Scholarship in Late Babylonian Uruk. Why the Sciences of the Ancient World Matter, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04176-2_9
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