Celestial signs were the most powerful, though. A sign observed privately within the home, such as the sudden appearance of insects, might apply to a single person. An omen visible in the street could cover a whole neighbourhood. But events in the sky could theoretically be witnessed by everyone, so these heralded the fate of the entire country: its harvest, warfare, politics or king. The tablets from the library detail how priests stationed around Ashurbanipal’s empire, but particularly in Babylon, sent him regular reports, with information about the celestial events they had observed and advice on what to do.
Their wisdom was collated in the Enuma Anu Enlil, the title coming from its first words, ‘When Anu and Enlil . . .’ (Anu was god of the heaven or sky; Enlil, god of the atmosphere, was ‘lord of the wind’.) Compiled around the late second millennium BC, it is essentially a handbook covering the earthly consequences of events, from the movements of the planets to the colour of the sun. ‘If on the first day of Nisannu the sunrise [looks] sprinkled with blood,’ reads one tablet, ‘grain will vanish in the country, there will be hardship and human flesh will be eaten.’ Another notes that if a solar eclipse takes place while Venus and Jupiter are visible, ‘the country will be attacked’. Among the most important events were lunar eclipses, which often foretold the death of a king. The moon’s disc was divided into quadrants, corresponding to the four regions of the known world: Amurru, Elam, Assyria and Babylonia. The areas darkened by the eclipse revealed which king was to die.
Letters from Ashurbanipal’s library describe the chilling way in which Mesopotamian kings avoided this fate. If an eclipse was observed, the monarch temporarily abdicated his position, and a substitute – an enemy, criminal, or just the gardener – would be dressed in the king’s robes and placed on the throne with a ‘girl’ or ‘virgin’ beside him as queen. The pair were entertained in luxury for up to a hundred days, enjoying sumptuous banquets, court musicians, and even royal boat trips. Then they were executed, and with the prediction fulfilled, the real king could safely return to his throne.
It’s a fascinating glimpse into a civilisation ruled by the sky, for whom the celestial dance of the sun, moon and planets was literally a matter of life and death. The priests of the Esagila temple weren’t simply superstitious fortune-tellers, however. In 1878, a reclusive Jesuit priest started copying more Babylonian tablets from the British Museum’s vast stores, and helped to reveal that their knowledge of the sky went far beyond what anyone had dreamed.
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After the destruction of Nineveh in 612 BC, the Babylonians inherited control of the Assyrian empire, stretching from what is now central Turkey in the north down to the Arabian desert. King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ascended the throne in 604 BC, spent the forty-three years of his reign rebuilding Babylon, until the city surpassed even its former glory. He built a huge palace, and protected the city with moats and walls so thick you could drive around the top in a four-horse chariot. There were eight gates in the walls, the most impressive of which was the Ishtar Gate, through which a 20-metre-wide processional street led into the city, ending at the Esagila temple. The gate and parade route were lined with glazed blue bricks, decorated with fierce yellow-and-white animals: dragons, lions and aurochs bulls.
Next to the temple, Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt the city’s ziggurat (previously destroyed by Sennacherib), so it was taller than ever before. Thought to have reached 90 metres, it had stairs around the outside and was topped with a shrine to Marduk, again decorated with vibrant blue bricks. The tower was called ‘Etemenanki’ – ‘House of the Foundation of Heaven and the Underworld’ – and was full of mythological and cosmological significance. There’s a clear resonance with the Ark in Gilgamesh: both were divided into seven storeys and covered an area of one ikû, around 90 metres squared.
This structure was reflected in the sky too. Ikû is what the Babylonians called the great square of our modern constellation Pegasus, points out Andrew George, who studies Babylonian culture at SOAS in London. Etemenanki was ‘a structure founded in both levels of the universe at once – one whose hugeness . . . transcends the gap between them’. It was the home of Marduk and the ultimate source of Babylon’s – and the king’s – security and power. In the Bible, for which Nebuchadnezzar is the wicked king who sacked Jerusalem and exiled the Jews, it became the Tower of Babel.
Much of this was confirmed by the German archaeologists who conducted the first scientific excavations of Babylon from 1899. By the time they arrived, however, there were hardly any clay tablets left. These had been removed by Rassam, who dug through large areas of the city in the 1870s, and by local people digging illegally, who sold them to antiquities dealers.3 Thousands of tablets were ultimately bought by the British Museum, where they caught the attention of a trainee priest called Johann Strassmaier.
Born in rural Bavaria in 1846, Strassmaier joined the Jesuits aged nineteen. A few years later, Bavaria became part of the newly united Imperial Germany, and the Jesuits were targeted by Otto von Bismarck, the country’s first chancellor. Bismarck saw their deference to the Pope as a challenge to his secular government, and in 1872 he banned them from teaching or working in Germany. Strassmaier emigrated to a Jesuit college in England, where he specialised in studying languages. He was ordained in 1876, and two years later moved to a Jesuit-owned house in Mayfair, London, walking distance from the British Museum.
But he couldn’t escape the tensions between secular and religious worldviews; scholars in London were clashing over a series of revolutionary scientific discoveries that appeared to undermine ideas in the Bible. In 1859, Charles Darwin had set out his theory of evolution by natural selection, challenging the biblical account of how species were created. Then, in 1872 came the Flood Tablet from Nineveh, causing some to claim that this crucial episode in the Old Testament was simply a reworked Mesopotamian myth. With a strong tradition of academic scholarship and an interest in defending the accuracy of the Bible, the Jesuits wanted to be part of the debate over the finds pouring out of Mesopotamia. Strassmaier was assigned to study cuneiform tablets at the British Museum, and set about teaching himself Akkadian.
Strassmaier was a small man, affable and kind, with a round face and ‘a nose that cannot be easily forgotten’. He originally planned to write a book on the history of the Semitic languages, but was dismayed by the vast number of tablets that lay unread and eroding in the museum’s stores. ‘How can a history of these languages be written,’ he remarked to a colleague, ‘whilst 60,000 cuneiform tablets remain uncopied and untranslated?’ So he embarked on a schedule that he kept for almost twenty years, arriving at the museum’s student room at 10 o’clock each morning and working through until 4 o’clock without any breaks. In that time, he copied the symbols from thousands of tablets, producing neat ink drawings on A4 sheets of paper folded in half. Whereas curator George Smith had read texts from Nineveh, Strassmaier focused on the tablets coming out of Babylon. They mostly dated from the time after Nebuchadnezzar, between the fifth to the first centuries BC, during which the city fell to the Persians and then to the Greeks.
At first, Strassmaier diligently copied economic records such as bills and contracts, the texts most scholars thought too boring to bother with. But he soon noticed large numbers of tablets with few words, just numbers. What text there was – planet names, for example – hinted that the subject matter was astronomical. The numbers made no sense to Strassmaier, so in 1880 he asked fellow priest Joseph Epping, who had been his maths teacher in Germany and was now based in the Netherlands, for help. Epping was reluctant at first. He couldn’t read cuneiform, and though astronomy was ‘not totally alien’ to him, he wrote later, the task seemed too daunting: ‘I did not believe to be such a computational artist, that I could solve an equation, that had so large a number of unknowns, and so little a number of knowns.’ But Strassmaier handed over his drawings, and eventually Epping started wrestling with the mystery numbers, looking for patterns that might reveal their meaning.
He started on a fragment with seven columns of numbers that cycled up and down. It took him months to make sense of it. As Epping worked, other cuneiform scholars were just getting an inkling of the Babylonians’ facility with mathematics, using a number system based on 60 (which we reprise every time we write a time in hours, minutes