Abstract
Among the large number of tablets containing scholarly texts that have been recovered from the so-called ‘house of the āšipus ’ in Uruk are forty astronomical or astrological tablets. This chapter presents an analysis of this corpus of tablets and tries to establish their role within the scholarly archives of the two different families of āšipus who resided in this house during its two phases of occupation. It also considers whether they provide evidence of ongoing astronomical activity by the scholars who lived in the house and, if so, what that activity entailed.
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- 1.
I exclude from this number a metrological tablet which contains a small section referring to the length of shadow cast by a gnomon (SpTU 4, 172; see Steele 2013: 26–28) and a few lexical texts which include the names of stars and constellations.
- 2.
This categorization is of course a modern one, but is at least partly reflected in the ancient sources as well which only occasionally mix material from more than one genre on the same tablet.
- 3.
Clear evidence that the preserved tablets do not represent the complete original archives is provided by two Kalendertext tablets, SpTU 3, 104 and SpTU 3, 105 . These tablets were almost certainly part of a series of twelve tablets, each tablet covering one month of the schematic 360-day year. It is not impossible, therefore, that as little as one-sixth of the tablets from these libraries have been recovered.
- 4.
Schmidt (1972).
- 5.
Clancier (2009: 387–400) contains a list of all of the tablets found in the house with assignments to the two phases of occupation. In only a very few cases do my assignments differ from Clancier’s.
- 6.
One tablet, SpTU 5, 270, a fragment from a list of constellations, is too broken to identify with certainty, but is probably astrological.
- 7.
- 8.
See the discussion in Hunger (2016).
- 9.
Hunger (1976: 11).
- 10.
Clancier (2009: 59).
- 11.
For the method of predicting phenomena based upon past observations, see for example Steele (2011).
- 12.
Hunger notes that the former edition should be disregarded.
- 13.
- 14.
Hunger and de Jong (2014: 192) suggest that the tablet might have been a surface find from the same location, and is therefore not connected to the house itself.
- 15.
- 16.
See Britton (2002) for a discussion of these cycles.
- 17.
Hunger (1991).
- 18.
Britton (2002: 71).
- 19.
Hunger (1991: 515).
- 20.
See already Hunger and Pingree (1999: 152–153).
- 21.
On these schemes, see Steele (2017a).
- 22.
Hunger (1976: 100).
- 23.
Calculations are made using approximate values following the same scheme as used in ACT Nos. 704, 705 and perhaps 704a; see Neugebauer (1955: 314). Note that in von Weiher’s transliteration, the sign he renders as U in lines 14-20 of column II should be read as the sexagesimal digit 10.
- 24.
Boiy (2000).
- 25.
Theoretically in Saturn System B , ΔT = ΔB + 11;27,20,37,30 if we assume that the scheme is calculated to full precision. See Neugebauer (1955: 314).
- 26.
Steele (2017c).
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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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Steele, J. (2019). Astronomical Activity in the ‘House of the āšipus’ in Uruk. 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_4
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