Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid
speaker
840 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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They were interested in every possible eventuality that could happen and and the outcomes associated with those. So they created this whole system of knowledge built on possibility effectively, but they structured these in really systematic ways. So for example, in writing down the omens about a lunar eclipse, let's say color, let's use color as an example,
You know, we know that there's only a certain number of colors that an eclipse can look like, and that's mainly red or no color, maybe orange sometimes. But they would apply a couple of other colors to these that were impossible, and they used these kind of ordered ways of expanding upon something they did observe.
So they're not making up phenomena, they're just modifying existing possible phenomena in these ways to generate all possible outcomes. in order to allow their omens to cover more ground essentially.
And these omens would have been used by decision makers like kings who needed to know whether it was safe to go to war at a particular time of year or whether they should undertake a journey or if there was an eclipse, And it foretold the death of the king.
Then the king had to go into hiding for a couple of months, and someone would be put in his place and pretend to be the king while the bad omen passed. And just to be absolutely sure that the king would be safe, they would then kill that person at the end of the few-month period. And this person would sort of sign up, and this wasn't a foreplay. Okay.
Yeah, it's pretty terrible. I mean, I think some people have argued that actually maybe for some people, you know, living like a king for three months might be the ultimate kind of, but I don't know that I would ever feel that way. True, maybe. So yeah, so they really took these omens seriously, and they generated them in really, really systematic ways.
It wasn't just a completely random collection of fake observations. They were grounded in empiricism, but then they were extrapolated in really, really specific ways.
Exactly. They're sort of internally kind of consistent with each other and the methods they use are agreed upon. And there's like a rule following that these scholars used in generating and writing these down, which is really interesting. But what gets us more science-y in a way, or science in the way that we might understand it today, which is not necessarily the pinnacle of how we might
understand science in the ancient world, but is the way that the omens were applied involved a lot of empirical observation. So moving into the first millennium BCE with the rise of Assyria, which was the largest empire the world had ever known up to that point, covering from
Persia or Iran in the east all the way to what is now Cyprus, and then in the south, Egypt all the way up north through Anatolia. It was a humongous empire run at its height by someone called King Ashurbanipal, who's an interesting figure in his own right.
But even the kings that came before him and Ashurbanipal himself, they relied on their court astronomers to take nightly observations of the sky and then interpret those with respect to these kind of textbooks of omens and then make predictions about what the king should or shouldn't do or whether he should lay low or everything was fine.
But as a result of making all these observations every night, they then started to be able to predict other astronomical phenomena. So there are these little leaps along the way. There's an astronomer called Rachel, who I think he's working under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. I hope that's right, but he's working sometime in the 8th or 7th centuries BCE.
And he starts to make predictions about, listen, there's going to be an eclipse on the 14th. So you're fine until then, but we'll figure it out when that happens. Or Mars will pass through Scorpio. When that happens, you should be okay. But until then, I would lay low because it's not a good omen for Mars to be in Scorpio, that sort of thing.
So you start to see predictions about other astronomical events, which is kind of impossible not to happen at some point if you're making so many observations every single night. of the skies and the patterns of planetary motion and of eclipse appearances.
That's a great question, because I think, first of all, it forces us to imagine what the sky would have looked like without light pollution, which must have been unbelievable. I grew up in Saudi Arabia, and when I was a kid, we used to go out to the desert on the weekends, and sometimes we'd sleep in the desert.
And I remember looking up at the night sky and being able to see the Milky Way and just probably a couple thousand stars. I mean, it's impossible to count them. Just out of this world levels of beauty and perspective that you can get from something like that. Whereas here in Oxford, I look up and it's like eight stars maybe that I can If I'm lucky, I can do it.
Okay, but I guess better than like three stars. If we can put ourselves in their shoes and imagine just how much they're looking at. But amongst those many thousands of anchors that move in a fixed pattern, if they do move very slowly, there are other objects that move quite quickly across the night sky from night to night, and those are the planets.
And five of those are visible to the naked eye without use of a telescope, which are the ones that are closest to us. So Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Venus in particular is so bright, if you ever have a chance outside of London to stargaze, Venus, it's impossible to miss that planet. So they noticed from early on, these planets move, whereas the stars are a fixed backdrop.
And there are some references to them using various metaphors, and I think one of them is that they're referred to as the wild sheep of the sky, whereas the stars are the domesticated sheep that don't move. So they have lots of lovely ways of referring to the differences. So they didn't have tools the way we would understand tools. They didn't have telescopes.
They didn't have big buildings that helped them organize the sky. They used the naked eye. They used their fingers to measure distances as well as other kind of more standardized measurements. And then eventually math was their most important tool for figuring out what was going on in the sky.
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