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.
Appearances
If there is a comet visible, they'll talk about a comet. And then they'll give things like the price of grain, the level of the Euphrates. So there's still this connection between stuff going on above and stuff going on below. It's not worded the way omens are, if X, then Y. It's just a flat-out list of And they do this for centuries. We don't know exactly who's writing these, as far as I know.
It may be astronomers, it might be scribes that are being dictated by the astronomers, or it might be two multiple people coming together together. to put these together. And these diaries really lay the groundwork, because there are so many observations in them, for algorithms to be generated to then predict and model the motion of planets in the sky using mathematics.
You can really see in the record the kind of step one, step two, step three. Not that necessarily the mathematical astronomy is a pinnacle of all this, but it is, as far as I know, the kind of earliest example of exact sciences in antiquity. And it's a really incredible moment and a really generational effort. that they've all done kind of together without whether they realized it or not.
Yeah, exactly, which is just so incredibly, to me, really moving because I think the history of science is a history of people trying to make sense of the world around them. They care enough in these periods to do that every single night, and they care enough to try to connect it with events on Earth, but they also care enough to think, oh, wow, this is actually cool. We can make math out of this.
I mean, there were nerds back then just as they are today. I love it.
Yes, I agree. And I think you have these occasional incredible moments in them, like Halley's Comet being observed in the sky. I think it's 164 BCE. And then again, 78 years later. I don't know if you've ever seen a comet. I saw Hale-Bopp when I was a kid, and I saw NEOWISE a couple of years ago during the pandemic.
And they're just like these incredible, like, what is this thing just floating in the sky? What is that? And they recognize that we've seen this one before. We saw this. Somebody wrote about this 78 years ago. Maybe they didn't know exactly that, but they knew that this wasn't some bizarre thing, that this was an observed phenomenon.
And they wrote about it, and I think moments like that are incredibly moving. And then there are the events on Earth, like the one you mentioned earlier. where you have a really boring sentence, the king died. And that king is Alexander the Great. And that's recorded in an astronomical text, essentially.
I mean, it's recorded in a lot of other places, but I think it's just incredible that it even finds its way into these observational records.
Absolutely. They contain datable observations. Please don't ask me how those got extrapolated, because it's just incredible that we can know exactly. This eclipse lasted for 47 minutes, and it's just incredible to me that we know all this stuff. So they do contain datable and verifiable observations of planetary motion, eclipse cycles, etc.,
Sure, yeah. So there are two kind of offshoots of the diaries and other observations that get made. And there is the mathematical astronomy, which uses pure math to model the movement of planets as well as the sun and the moon and eclipses.
But then there are the goal year texts, which use just pattern recognition, essentially, to do the same thing, but they're using recurring patterns that have been observed in the texts to predict when the next such event will occur. And so what they are, basically, are a list of predictions of astronomical phenomena for the year to come, for the goal year.
They make those predictions, again, in a kind of descriptive way based on existing patterns, and that's really different to the mathematical stuff, but they're happening alongside each other. So even as mathematical astronomy takes off and we have these incredible instructions for how to carry out these procedures, people are still doing the non-mathematical predictions alongside that.
They're doing a whole host of other seemingly less science-y types of astronomy as well alongside that, including using sort of ideal schemes to model the universe that are incorrect, that are just not correct, but that they're still using them maybe to use as a kind of benchmark for observation or a way of predicting things mathematically in a simpler way. We're not really sure.
It's a nice example of how they're still doing things the kind of old way alongside this completely innovative way of doing things.
Yes, one of my favorite things to talk about. So I've alluded to this kind of ideal way of doing math and sandwiched in that enuma, anu, enlil. There were those lunar tables that offer us incorrect ways of modeling the universe mathematically, essentially. One of the incorrect but ideal ways that they modeled time was using a schematic calendar, which
which was actually a very practical way to measure time. So the calendar in Mesopotamia was 12 months of 30 days each. There's also a cultic calendar, which every single month they wait for the new moon, and then they announce the start of the next month, etc. But
In order for things to be possible to do, like paying interest and knowing when things are due, you have to have a fake calendar, basically. And that was 12 months of 30 days each. And that formed part of something that we call schematic astronomy, which all these other kind of slightly incorrect modeling of the universe fall into as well.
And there's evidence that then around 500 BCE, just after 500 BCE, they projected that calendar onto the sky, onto the ecliptic. So the band of the sky where eclipses occur and where the planets are moving and where the Sun is moving throughout the year as well. They divided the sky into 12 months of 30 days each, so 12 sections of 30 degrees each, and that becomes the zodiac.
And in really early descriptions of the zodiac, those 12 sections of the sky that are named back then as well after constellations, are initially referred to by the names of the months of the calendar. So, this is a really interesting kind of theoretical exercise that ends up with this spatial expression. And eventually, that becomes the zodiac that we know today.
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