Long before telescopes or space agencies, ancient Mesopotamians were decoding the secrets of the cosmos. Beneath skies unpolluted by modern light, they tracked the movements of planets, charted eclipses, and read the stars not just for science—but for signs from the gods.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid to uncover the origins of written astronomy and the extraordinary legacy of left by the Mesopotamians that studied it. Their observations shaped empires, guided kings, and laid the groundwork for astronomy as we know it. From clay tablets to the zodiac, from omens to eclipse prediction—this is the story of how ancient Mesopotamians turned stargazing into science.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
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Nineveh, 2,700 years ago. A man looks up at the night sky. In an age where light pollution was minimal, he sees countless stars high above him. His name is Balassi, and he is an astronomer, serving in the court of the famous Assyrian king, Esaraddon. Amongst the twinkling stars, he can also see his favourite celestial object, a light that shines incredibly bright in the night sky.
This was Dilibat, the Sumerian name for Venus, the shining planet strongly associated with the goddess Ishtar. Balasi was in awe of Venus and the rest of this great divine world above, but he was also annoyed that Only recently, another scholar had mistakenly identified Venus as Mercury. How this scholar could have made such an error was beyond ballassy.
The planets looked completely different to the naked eye. Whereas Venus was the brightest object in the sky after the moon, Mercury was a minuscule dot almost impossible to find if you didn't know where to look. Worst of all, this astronomer had then proceeded to misinterpret this celestial omen from the gods and sent the wrong prediction to the king. The moron.
Such an error had to be punished and corrected. And so, Balassi had written to the king. Imprinting his message on a clay tablet, it was the ancient Mesopotamian equivalent of a brutal peer review. He slated his colleague for not knowing the cycles or revolutions of Venus. He labelled him an ignoramus.
Unfortunately for this unnamed Assyrian astronomer, the tablet has survived and will forever be his legacy. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring the fascinating story of astronomy in ancient Mesopotamia and how this scientific field evolved over more than a thousand years. Early on, astronomy was linked primarily to omens.
Comets, eclipses, stars and planets were interpreted as signs left in the night sky by the gods to be deciphered by skilled astronomers who would then predict what this meant would happen on Earth. But over time, these observations were no longer just used to predict events on Earth, but also to predict future astronomical phenomena.
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Chapter 2: How did ancient Mesopotamians interpret the night sky?
Yeah, that's another really interesting kind of feature.
Or textbook, sorry.
Yeah, well, we call them handbooks, actually. But I use the word textbook because sometimes I think that tells us a little bit more about what they were to these people. In scholarship in ancient Mesopotamia, there are kind of multiple strands. And one of those is the standardization of collections of omens.
So in the medical tradition, there's a standardized collection of diagnostic omens, which are organized from head to toe. It's 40 tablets. It's copied in the same order over and over again once it achieves that standard form for centuries with some differences, but the kind of order of tablets stays the same even if there are some variations of like the odd omen or sign used.
Similarly, in astronomy, there was a kind of standardized collection of astronomical omens The title we give to that work, which is about 70 tablets long, I think, and it's 6,500 to 7,000 omens recorded in those tablets. We call it Enuma, Anu, and Lil, which means Wen, Anu, and Enlil, which are two of the major deities.
Anu is the sky god, Enlil is the Sumerian name for the king of the gods, and this also refers to two of the three main sections of the sky. The sky is divided into the region of Anu, the region of Enlil, and the region of Ea, who I haven't referred to yet, who's a god of wisdom. So that textbook of omens, it's organized.
I mean, the first bit's on lunar omens, and then it talks about solar omens, and then weather omens, and then planetary omens. So it's organized. It's not just like a completely random collection of observations and predictions or fake observations and predictions.
There's also the tablet in there that gives tables, like lunar tables, of the duration of the visibility of the Moon or the number of hours of sunlight and daylight on the equinoxes and solstices, that sort of thing. So it gives these kind of ideal mathematical tables halfway through, which we think were used to allow for anomalies against those mathematical ideals to be considered as omens.
So it's a really packed, it's a really dense textbook of omens. And that, we think, comes from the 1st millennium BCE. There are some forerunners that are earlier, like the lunar omens from the Old Babylonian period from around 2000 BCE, but it achieves this kind of standard form that's not exactly standardized all across the board, but is more or less standard in the 1st millennium BCE.
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