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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That is the goatfish, so Capricorn, which I only recently learned was actually a goatfish as well in later years.
Yeah, because it's a goat with like a mermaid tail. Yes. The scorpions, Scorpius, Leo, Gemini, the twins, etc. So they named each of these 12 sections after the main constellation within it. And that is where we get the zodiac from.
And the zodiac is this incredible innovation because it allows them to create a new celestial coordinate system to record their observations, but then also to make mathematical calculations within those as well, especially that sort of 30 degrees each. So it's a slightly different system of measurement that is being used in those texts.
The mathematical astronomy texts, we typically divide into two categories. The first category is these tables that give the kind of values that would be generated with an equation of some kind or an algorithm of some kind. And then the second category is procedure texts that give instructions for those calculations, which I think is just absolutely incredible.
If you read these texts, you have to read them about 200 times. And even at the end of those, you're like, I actually still have no clue what's going on. But the procedure texts... are basically verbal descriptions of an algorithm.
They're giving you instructions, you know, this is the maximum, this is the minimum, you add X to that, and if it falls above, then you subtract this much, and then you eventually get this kind of zigzag within a maximum and minimum, and that's supposed to lead you to whatever the distances that has been traveled or whatever is trying to be modeled.
So there's a wonderful example as well of a procedure text for Jupiter, for the planet Jupiter, that is giving instructions for calculating the distance traveled by Jupiter over 60 days. And it basically models this, and this is all described with words and, of course, numbers, but it's not a flat-out equation like you would have in a math textbook today.
of modeling that distance as two trapezoids. But the trapezoids aren't in real space. They're in abstract mathematical space. And then the area of these trapezoids is the distance traveled by Jupiter. So it's a highly geometric and I think almost like a precursor to calculus method that's being applied to calculate how far Jupiter has traveled.
Not actually how far Jupiter the planet has traveled, but how far in their vision it has traveled.
Yeah, absolutely. But what I think is really interesting is that even alongside the development of mathematical astronomy, the development of the zodiac, which leads to completely new ways of thinking about other stuff too, not just the sky.
So medicine was revolutionized by the zodiac because it made it possible to connect the zodiac to different parts of the body and just understand the body differently. The cultic calendar was changed with reference to the zodiac where
The position of planets within the zodiac was then connected with certain dates, and just like we do astrology today, it's just a different way of organizing information that makes it a little bit more bounded and a little bit easier to follow. There's an excellent scholar named Dr. Willis Munro who's written about how knowledge becomes bounded in the late 1st millennium BCE.
So alongside all that, omens are still important. And the people doing the astronomy are still calling themselves, which means the scribes of Enuma Anu Enla, the scribes of this textbook. So even in the later periods where maybe it dwindles in importance, there's still that prestige attached to it. omen-taking or a connection with that distant past maybe is another way to account for it.
So I think this kind of proliferates a new way of thinking, but alongside that, there's still respect for the past.
That's a great question too. So I think typically math was used for practical things to calculate the area of a field and then the yield that that field might have and therefore how much money you might be able to make from it, that sort of thing, or whatever math you needed to do to calculate how many bricks you needed to build something.
But in the later periods, I don't know if that changes outside of astronomy. And I think there are lots of other things going on as well in the later period. So cuneiform culture is starting to get more and more restricted and When the Greeks come in, in particular, you can see a real decrease in the number of people doing cuneiform.
Actually, this starts to happen even with the Persians from about 539 BCE. Instead of being attached to the royal court and having all this prestige, they get relegated to temples, which has become the main sites for cuneiform worship. or a scholarship being done in cuneiform in this way that's kind of established by thousands of years of tradition as well as the innovations that go along with it.
And then when the Greeks come, that gets even more restricted, and then after the Parthians, even more so. So, I think there is much more going on outside of cuneiform that we don't know about during these later periods because they weren't written on clay. I mean, Why did they stop using cuneiform? You know, historians, how are we supposed to know what they were doing?
And there are lots of references to writing boards and scrolls in the cuneiform text as well. So we know there's this whole other corpus that may well include some pretty cool math. But as far as I know, in terms of schools and what people were learning, math was, well, I guess in astronomy too, it's for practical things.
I think it gets transmitted. So it gets a new life, really. And there are little pockets of evidence for the transmission of Babylonian astronomical knowledge.
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