The Frontiers of Ancient Science: Essays in Honor of Heinrich Von Staden by Holmes Brooke Fischer Klaus-Dietrich

Author:Holmes, Brooke,Fischer, Klaus-Dietrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2015-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Grafton has said that “the continuity of the astrological tradition is, perhaps, unmatched in the intellectual history of the West,”1082 and in another context noted “how astrological procedures outlasted more fragile creations of the human spirit, like the Roman Empire.”1083 This is perfectly true. Astrological prognostication outlived many other forms of ancient Near Eastern prognosticative techniques, e. g., from the exta of a sacrificed sheep. What is at issue, however, is not merely the continuity of astrology back to celestial divination in ancient Mesopotamia,1084 but the continuity seen manifested more broadly in preoccupations with natural phenomena as signs from the deity (or deities). Ancient works that were produced for such purposes, such as the many cuneiform text series of omens (celestial and terrestrial, including dreams, abnormal births, physiognomy, and everyday occurrences in a person’s house) dominated what we can classify generally as knowledge in the Babylonian and Assyrian scribal traditions of ancient Mesopotamia, though they may also be classified in a variety of other ways, as science, or as divination, and associated with other forms of practice, such as magic, or even religion.

Introducing his book The Bible: Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science, Peter Harrison said,

Many histories of science have tended to work backwards, beginning with the modern conception of the discipline of science, and projecting it back in time. Historians of science, as Paolo Rossi has observed, frequently concern themselves with ‘an imaginary object’, constructing it from a variety of texts and heterogeneous disciplines. It is of course inevitable that in order to understand the past we must understand it through modern conceptions. At the same time, it needs to be recognised that ‘science’, as we understand it, does not have a history which can be traced back beyond the seventeenth century. Accordingly, what I have sought to do in this book is to work forwards, in as much as that is possible. For virtually the first fifteen hundred years of the common era the study of natural objects took place within the humanities, as part of an all-encompassing science of interpretation which sought to expound the meanings of words and things.1085

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