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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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.
But scribes have other kind of sources at their fingertips as well that are very similar to that textbook and that are in some ways based on parts of it.
Yeah, definitely. And Babylon also becomes a major kind of player at the very end of cuneiform culture and the kind of height of mathematical astronomy and stuff. So we can hopefully talk about it again a bit later. But yeah, so the Kassites, they're around from about 1500 BCE to 1100 to 1000 BCE. I think the Amarna letters that we were talking about, they come from the Kassite period.
But one of the interesting things that the Kassite scholars did, we think, is that they collected all these threads of knowledge in various disciplines. So primarily astronomy and medicine and a couple of others. And they created these standard textbooks. So there are lots of reasons to attribute this kind of flourishing of scholarship to this period. And literature as well.
I always forget about literature. Sorry. I feel bad saying that. They just standardize a whole host of different works. And then it's in this form that a lot of these textbooks get copied. Previously, it was thought that Enuma Anu Enlil, the astronomical omen compendium I just referred to, was written in this period.
But now I think they've moved the date a little bit further based on other evidence. But the Kassite period is really a kind of anchor for a lot of the production of these texts.
In order to expand upon the omens, so let's say you start with something like Venus wearing a crown. Venus, the planet, sometimes looks like it's surrounded by a bit of a halo. They might expand on that by giving the crown a different color, red, green, white, black, etc. They might expand on it by saying it's really bright or really dim. So opposites, binary opposites.
And they might say it's dimmed on the left side or it's dimmed on the right side. So they definitely use a lot of left-right symbolism, let's say, in generating outcomes for these omens. Because again, it's very unlikely that these are grounded in prediction of
like something being observed with the moon and an actual political event happening immediately after, very unlikely that that's the source for there's just far too many of them. One really nice example from Enuma Anu Enlil is a description of Venus being dimmed on the right side, having a bad outcome, which is that childbirth will be difficult for women.
And the next omen after that is Venus being dimmed on the left side, having a good omen, which is that childbirth will be easy. So the kind of reasoning there is that Something bad being dim happening to the good side, the right side, has a bad outcome because it's a positive and a negative. Something bad happening to the bad side, they kind of cancel each other out.
So dimmed left side has a good outcome because two negatives become a positive. So there's almost like a mathematical approach to it. But yes, there's definitely this left-right symbolism That comes up in really surprising ways in The Omens and really shows how much they thought about how to generate these according to really specific rules.
Even if reading them at first glance, you're like, what on earth? This is so bizarre. Like this is, you know, how are they making these up? But there are actually internal rules to doing it. And right left is part of that.
Yeah, it's an incredible moment, I think, in the history of science is when these observations are no longer used or no longer just used to make decisions about stuff on Earth, but when they're used to predict other related phenomena. And that really starts to happen, I would say, 8th, 7th century BCE onward and really takes off after that, after the fall of Assyria.
And then you start to get different observational astronomy texts coming out of Babylonia, so Babylon and Borsippa and related cities, Uruk as well. Part of that is that because they were doing so many observations at night, it's impossible not to notice patterns. I mean, we're kind of built to notice patterns, aren't we?
And even if those patterns occur over multiple generations, you still have that accumulation of knowledge that is written down that allows people to access and learn from older knowledge in order to make predictions based on patterns that they can find in these texts. And from about 600, so that's a little early, but B.C.E. onwards, you start to get these diaries.
We call them astronomical diaries from Babylonia. So now we're leaving the Assyrians behind. We're leaving behind Balasi, and we're leaving behind Rashil and all the other astronomers I've already referred to, and poor Uragula, the physician who fell out of favor. And we're moving now to, let's just say Babylon.
where we have these nightly long observations being written down about everything going on in the sky as well as everything going on on Earth that's deemed to be relevant. So they give all the positions of the planets. They give whether or not an eclipse is predicted or witnessed, the duration of visibility, what type of moon. Is it a new moon? Is it a full moon?
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