Surveying the Heavens: The Adaptation of Babylonian Surveyors’ Techniques to Mathematical Astronomy

What do the Babylonian astral sciences of the third Century BCE have to do with canal excavations in the second millennium BCE? The project Surveying the Heavens addresses this question by examining epistemic change visible at the intersection of two Mesopotamian knowledge traditions: the Old Babylonian surveyor’s tradition and then the astral tradition of later periods.

Surveying was a crucial activity in ancient Mesopotamia. Located in western Asia, this region was and still is dominated by two flood-prone rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates. By the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000–1600 BCE), an entire knowledge system and economy was developed to manage these rivers and augment productivity—the surveyor’s tradition.

By the late Old Babylonian period (c. 1710 BCE), the antecedents of Babylonian Astral science appeared in texts such as the forerunners to the celestial omen series Enuma Anu Enlil. By the Seleucid period, 1400 years later, synodic tables and similar texts utilized a kind of predictive astronomy that seemingly incorporated tools developed by the surveyor’s tradition.

A goal of this project is to engage the three thematic domains of the ASTRA project, knowledge transmission, translocation, and transcreation, through a cognitive lens. Questions to be answered are: What tools developed by surveyors of the early second millennium BCE were transmitted to the new first millennium BCE astral science? When and where did transmission take place? Why? How? In short, the project Surveying the Heavens examines how old technology melded with new cultural developments to create a novel science: Astronomy.