Late Babylonian reflections on the planets as the cause of eclipses By Mathieu Ossendrijver

https://www.academia.edu/143413566/Late_Babylonian_reflections_on_the_planets_as_the_cause_of_eclipses?email_work_card=title The question of how to interpret, predict, and explain eclipses has occupied scholars across the ancient world. Mesopotamian scholars stand out for the duration and the depth of their engagement with eclipses, as evidenced in a large and diverse body of cuneiform sources dating between the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1800 BCE) and the end of cuneiform writing (ca. 100 CE). However, the question of what causes an eclipse is only rarely addressed directly in Mesopotamian sources. The present contribution discusses two Late Babylonian texts that have thus far been ignored in discussions of this topic. It is argued here that they are unusually explicit in addressing the question, and that the answer provided reflects a new development in Babylonian scholarly thought on the cause of eclipses. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. After presenting the Late Babylonian tablets, their contents are discussed in the context of earlier Mesopotamian sources on the cause of eclipses.