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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
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Yes, and they refer to them so many times in the sources that it's sort of hard to doubt our understanding of their naming. But for example, one of the words they used to refer to Venus was dilbat or dilibat, which comes from basically the word for shining, because it's just such a bright object. Makes sense, yeah.
Yeah, and then similarly, the one for Jupiter, which is also bright, sometimes easy to confuse Jupiter and Venus if it's not a good viewing conditions, is Kakabupetsu, which means white star, because it looked, again, like a really bright white star.
Saturn, I think, is called Kayamanu, which means it has to do with steadiness, I think, because Saturn moves a bit more slowly because it's further away. And then there are also deities associated with the planets, just like in Greek. I mean, our names of the planets today are based on the names of deities, Jupiter being the kind of head of the Roman pantheon, for example.
And interestingly, the planet Jupiter in Mesopotamia in Babylonian Assyria was associated with the god Marduk, who was the head of the Babylonian pantheon as well, so that pantheon's Jupiter or Zeus, so to speak. Venus associated with Ishtar, who was Inanna in the earlier periods, but the goddess of love and war, Ishtar. Mars with the god of war, Nergal.
So there are some really interesting kind of overlap in the deities associated with the planets. And sometimes the planets are referred to by their kind of divine name, by the name of the deity associated with them.
I think yes and no. A lot of these texts exhort secrecy, so you must not share this with the uninitiated, for example, and there's a bit of gatekeeping there. So in that sense, there's a kind of prestige to it and a guardedness to this type of knowledge that requires quite a lot of training to be able to do it correctly, which makes perfect sense.
It's not straightforward to observe planetary motion and predict it and memorize a lot of these omens associated with those and know how to communicate with the king as well. But there's also evidence that some of them weren't treated particularly well.
For example, there are some letters in which astronomers are writing to the king saying, like, why am I doing this manual labor, which I'm supposed to do instead of paying tax? It means I can't teach the next generation of astronomers. I'm so busy doing all this stuff that I don't have time to do my thing, my astronomy stuff. You know, there are other letters from court scholars.
There's one named Urad Gula. He's a physician, so it's a slightly off topic, in which whatever he did, he fell out of favor with the king. And he and his father write multiple letters begging that he be reinstated because he can no longer afford to live and he's not being paid, you know, the way his father had been paid. In one of them, he writes that he's dying of a broken heart.
So you can kind of feel the precariousness of it. You know, yes, what they're doing is uber important to royal decision-making. It takes many years of training to achieve, but it doesn't always match up to the way they get treated in the texts.
Absolutely. And you also get a sense of it wasn't always sunshine and roses between the astronomers themselves. So there's an interesting letter from an astronomer named Balasi in which he's responding to a concern of the king. So the king wrote these letters to the scholars saying, so-and-so said that Mars is visible, like what's your take on it effectively or that sort of thing.
And there's one in which the king has obviously written and said, Venus is apparently visible, and that's a problem, so can you just talk me through what's happened? We don't have the original letter, but we have Bellassi's response, which is basically something along the lines of, the guy who told you that Venus is visible is an idiot. It's actually Mercury. I think he calls him an ignoramus.
He's actually Mercury. And actually, you know, it's quite difficult to confuse that. Mercury and Venus, especially with no light pollution. I find that difficult to wrap my head around.
So there's also a little bit of a really kind of nasty peer review system sometimes that comes through in these letters reminding us that these aren't just tablets floating around full of knowledge, but there are people... that are writing these and people that are stressing over these. And even kings who stress over some of the things that they're either observing or experiencing.
The letters include letters back and forth to physicians as well. And there are some really lovely kind of human moments where, again, we don't have the letter from the king, but the physician is quoting the king's worry about their baby having a fever and saying, don't worry, it's teething. Your baby's teething. he's going to be totally fine.
I know it's stressful, but he'll be fine in four days or whatever the exact prognosis ended up being. So there's a lot of humanity as well as really interesting science in these letters.
Yeah, that's another really interesting kind of feature.
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.
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