The Recovery Of Babylonian Astronomy by Gary D. Thompson
Copyright © 2009-2010 by Gary D. Thompson
The Recovery of Babylonian Astronomy
Strassmaier, Epping, Kugler, and Schaumberger: A History and Legacy of Their Co-operative Pioneering Effort to Recover Babylonian Astronomy
by Gary D. Thompson
(1) Introduction
Part 1: The recovery of astronomical cuneiform tablets
The recovery of cuneiform tablets
The presently identified sources for the study of late Babylonian (mathematical) astronomy are two groups of archives found at Babylon and Uruk. It has been satisfactorily established that all the mathematical astronomy texts came from these two major archives. In all likelihood approximately two-thirds of all the mathematical astronomical texts we have have come from the ancient city of Babylon, and the other one-third has come from the ancient city of Uruk. The archive of cuneiform tablets at Babylon was discovered earlier than the archive of cuneiform tablets at Uruk. The archive of clay tablets at Babylon was excavated during the 1870's and 1880's. The archive of clay tablets at Uruk was excavated during the early 1910's. The tablets recovered from Babylon are far more numerous, cover a longer time period, and encompass many more different types of astronomical texts than the tablets recovered from Uruk. The astronomical cuneiform texts held in the British Museum, London, most likely belong exclusively to the archive of tablets located at Babylon. The date of their acquisition/arrival at the British Museum can be determined from the old inventory numbers used by the British Museum. It can be reliably concluded that the bulk of the archive of clay tablets from Babylon arrived at the British Museum between November, 1876, and July, 1882. During this 6 year period the number of tablets held by the British Museum is estimated to have increased from over 32,000 to more than 46,000. A small number of pioneering assyriologists, such as Johann Strasmaier (also spelled/misspelled as Strassmeyer and Strassmeier) and Theophilus Pinches came to realise that amongst this multitude of texts there were many hundreds of astronomical texts.
Not all tablets comprising the archive at Babylon were acquired by the British Museum. Some smaller batches of tablets (looted from the excavation site) were purchased by museums and collectors in Paris, Berlin, Philadelphia, and New York. A larger degree of dispersion occurred with the archive found at Uruk. Immediately with its discovery, the archive of cuneiform tablets from Uruk was dispersed all over the world by both excavators and antiquity dealers. The result was it was not until the 1920's that the additional astronomical texts from Uruk were identified and made available by museums in Paris and Berlin. The cuneiform texts from Uruk became widely known largely through François Thureau-Dangin's book Tablettes d'Uruk, à l'usage des prêtres du Temple d'Anu au temps des Séleucides (1922). However, it soon became evident that much more excavated material, including astronomical tablets, remained unpublished.
Part 2: The nature and decipherment of cuneiform script
Understanding cuneiform texts
The Sumerians created cuneiform script circa 3500 BCE. The first known writing, on a small limestone tablet, comes from Kish and is dated to circa 3500 BCE. Some of the symbols are believed to have originated as pictographs, but by 3000 BCE they had become completely/mostly abstract. Pictograms, or drawings representing actual things, were the basis for cuneiform writing. Early pictograms resembled the objects they represented, but through repeated use over time they began to look simpler, more abstract. These types of marks eventually became wedge-shaped ("cuneiform"), that could convey sounds, or abstract concepts. The first pictograms were drawn in vertical columns with a pen made from a sharpened reed. However, two developments made the process quicker and easier: People began to write in horizontal rows, and a new type of pen was used which was pushed lightly into the clay tablet, producing 'wedge-shaped' signs that are now known as cuneiform writing. The German scholars Oluf Tychsen and Georg Grotefend, and the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask, were the first to decipher several cuneiform signs. Prior to 1850 the French Orientalist Eugene Burnouf and the British Assyriologist Henry Rawlinson independently interpreted most of the signs of the Persian cuneiform system.
There are 4 main stages in understanding/reading a cuneiform text, the 1-part descriptive stage and the 3-part interpretive stage. In the descriptive phase, there is the requirement to establish what cuneiform signs, or graphemes, are actually written. The text is then copied i.e., the identified signs are copied onto a sheet of paper (a drawing ('autograph') is made of the signs on the tablet). This descriptive stage requires minimal or no knowledge of what the text means, i.e., it is context-free. In the interpretive phase, there is the requirement to make sense of the signs comprising the 'autograph.' This involves transliteration, transcription, and translation. The interpretive phase is a complex, content-bound, and iterative process due to the process requiring sign ordering, transliteration, phonemic normalization (or pronunciation), and translation.
Sumero/Akkadian cuneiform is attested by hundreds of thousands of documents in many genres and several languages from various cultures spanning three millennia. It is a complex syllabographic and logographic script system with perhaps 2000 distinct graphemes (characters). It is marked by extensive multi-valency - one grapheme can have multiple phonemic and semantic realizations.
The general practice among cuneiformists of working almost exclusively in Roman alphabetic transliteration, although suitable for its intended purposes, presents difficulties for the application of computers to cuneiform research and instruction. The simple addition of graphemically encoded cuneiform to the current practice of transliteration (i.e., the addition of transcription encoding to transliteration) will enable a dramatic increase in philological and linguistic productivity.
Part 3: Key terms
Decipherment
Decipherment means to interpret the meaning of the cuneiform signs - to understand what the cuneiform signs mean.
The decipherment of cuneiform began in the eighteenth century when European scholars, antiquaries, and travellers visited the ancient Near East and began actively searching for proof of the places and events recorded in the Bible. Their efforts resulted in lost cities such as Nineveh being uncovered, and a range of artefacts, including thousands of clay tablets covered in cuneiform, being brought back to Europe.
Scholars began the incredibly difficult task of trying to decipher the unfamiliar cuneiform script/signs representing long dead languages that no-one had heard for some 2000 years at least. Due to the work of a small number of persons, gradually, and with great difficulty, the cuneiform script/signs were reasonably deciphered. By 1851, Edward Hincks and Henry Rawlinson could read approximately 200 cuneiform signs. In their efforts they were joined by two other decipherers: a young German scholar Julius Oppert, and the versatile British Orientalist William Talbot.
Proof that cuneiform script/signs had been successfully deciphered came in 1857 with a famous experiment. The Royal Asiatic Society, through Edwin Norris, the secretary, sent copies of a newly found clay tablet recording the military and hunting achievements of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I (reigned 1114-1076 BCE) to, Henry Rawlinson, Edward Hincks, Julius Oppert and William Talbot. A jury of experts empanelled to examine the resulting translations and assess their accuracy declared itself in agreement that each person, working independently, was able to make a translation that broadly agreed with each of the other translations. There were a number of slight discrepancies. Talbot had made the most mistakes. Oppert's translation contained a number of dubious passages due to his lack of familiarity with the English language. However, Hincks' and Rawlinson's translations were almost identical.
However, even today, there are still elements of cuneiform writing that are not completely understood. The study of cuneiform script/signs continues unabated amongst specialist scholars.The basic steps in translating cuneiform script involve (following John Heise Akkadian Language): (1) determination of the cuneiform text (= the recognition of the signs); (2) transliteration (= the determination of the values of the signs); (3) transcription or normalisation (= the values of signs are combined into Akkadian words); and (4) translation (the establishment of meanings in, for example, English).
The 4 basic steps in translating cuneiform signs (from Akkadian Language by John Heise).
(1) Recognition of signs
The traditional formal recognition of signs has involved the process of cuneiform copying (sign ordering). The process involves reproducing the contents of the original tablet as a drawing. An assyriologist/sumerologist/cuneiform philologist/epigraphist makes a line art drawing ('autograph') to show the signs on a clay tablet or stone inscription in a graphic form suitable for use/publication. The first step is to recognise the signs. There are about 600 cuneiform signs. The written language consists of about 600 symbols, each representing what we term a syllable or word fragment. The syllables can be words by themselves or can be combined with other syllables, and they can often have multiple meanings. Recognition in practice is often difficult for a number of reasons. Signs may overlap or may be very stretched; clay tablets may be damaged or difficult to read. Interpreting a broken sign is partly done with the requirement/understanding that it makes sense in the context.
To help resolve difficulties in making an 'autograph' the assyriologist/sumerologist/cuneiform philologist/epigraphist will often arrange arrange for another scholar to collate (compare) the existing 'autograph' against the actual tablet(s), to determine if any signs, especially broken or damaged signs, should be represented differently.
(2) Transliteration
Transliteration is the conversion (and recording) from one script (writing system) to another. In the case of cuneiform script, transliteration is the conversion from cuneiform signs to syllables or words. Depending on the context, a cuneiform sign can be read either as one of several possible logograms, each of which corresponds to a word in the Sumerian/Akkadian spoken language. The process of transliteration involves an assyriologist/sumerologist/cuneiform philologist/epigraphist determines/deciding how to represent the cuneiform signs in Roman script. Ideally, transliteration tries to be lossless. Cuneiform has a specific format for transliteration. There are conventions about how to transliterate. Choices in how to transliterate cuneiform signs depends on the context. The transcription step depends on knowledge of the grammar. The transliteration of cuneiform signs involves decisions regarding how the signs should be read and assembled, and the converted syllables separated with dashes.
(3) Transcription or normalization (pronunciation)
Transcription is the conversion of the sounds of one language to the script of another language (the formation of spoken words). It involves combining the sign values forming Sumerian/Akkadian/Assyrian words. The transliterated text when transcribed combines/joins the transliterated sign values into Sumerian/Akkadian/Assyrian as spoken (also called normalization). Anglicizing is a transcription method. Romanization encompasses several transliteration and transcription methods. The transcription step in the process to translation depends on knowledge of the grammar of the source-language. With cuneiform scripts there are no word separators (blancs) as in many ancient languages, like Latin.
(4) Translation
Translation involves turning one language into another. It is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. In order for this to be done successfully there has to be an understanding of the basic principles of the grammar of the source-language. The actual meaning (i.e., translation into English, or other target-language) also depends on the knowledge we have of the Sumerian/Akkadian/Assyrian culture. This involves/enables interpretation skills. Because Sumerian/Akkadian/Assyrian and English word-order are completely different, it is not always possible to translate a cuneiform text word-for-word.
Part 4: Pioneering assyriologists
Archibald Sayce
Archibald Sayce. (Life dates: 1846-1933). British assyriologist. One of the pioneers of Assyriology in Britain. Born at Shirehampton (near Bristol), England. When only 10 years old he began reading the Greek classics, in the Greek language. In 1869 he was elected a fellow and lecturer at Oxford University (where he remained for the rest of his career). In 1870 he was ordained as an Anglican minister. In 1891 he was elected Professor of Assyriology and remained in that position until 1919. He took lengthy sabbaticals. From 1908 to 1910 he studied in the Sudan, and from 1911 to 1912 he studied (and travelled extensively) in the Far East. Later in life he took annual trips up the Nile river in Egypt. His primary interests were languages and philology (including the cuneiform languages such as Assyrian and Hittite, and old Hebrew), and the history of the Hebrews. In the 1900s he also became interested in Egyptology. Whilst at Oxford University he was involved in archaeological excavations in Egypt (with the British architect Somers Clarke (1841-1926)) at Meroe and El Kab. His lectures usually formed the basis for his publications. He is considered a "generalist" more than a "specialist", and also by 1900 had an established reputation as a gross populariser. However, his work on the Assyrian language had considerable importance. Also, he was instrumental in the decipherment of the Hittite language. His lengthy article "Astronomy and Astrology of the Babylonians." published in 1874 in Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology (Volume 3, Part 1, 1874, Pages 145-339) was one of the earliest to recognise and translate astronomical cuneiform texts.
Non-mathematical astronomical texts, and astrological texts, in the British Museum were first published in WAI II (Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, published 1866) and WAI III (published 1870). WAI II can be deemed the earliest work on Babylonian astronomy. Archibald Sayce (1846-1933) and Robert Bosanquet (1841-1912) initiated the study of Babylonian astronomy with their 3 articles in published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 1879-1880. "The Babylonian Astronomy. No 2" (published 1880) included a lengthy discussion of K 8538 (an Assyrian 8-sector planisphere).
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