In the Path of the Moon

Francesca Rochberg, Ph.D., University of Chicago, is Catherine and William Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published widely on Babylonian divination and science, including The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

“This collection is a praiseworthy testament to the dedication, focus, and enterprise of a scholar without whose attention and efforts the field would be all the poorer. Rochberg’s scholarship is both definitive and exemplary, and she poses and addresses general questions that are both lucid and evocative, with a characteristic flair and expertise. In this way, her work is an aid as well as an inducement to current and succeeding generations of Assyriologists and Classicists to further their studies on the intellectual cultures of the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean, and beyond, and to investigate more thoroughly their contributions, interaction, and legacy.” - Clemency Montelle, University of Canterbury, in: Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol.133, no.2 (2013)"The volume offers food for thought, not just identifying particular ideas and elements that have Mesopotamian origins or discussing the nature of the Babylonian preoccupation with the celestial bodies, but raising questions of the transmission of cultural artefacts, which routes they may have followed, and how they were incorporated into a new religious and / or scientific context." - Ulla Susanne Koch, University of Freiburg, in: Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, vol.110, no.6 (2015)"The collected essays in this volume, successive steps in an ordered path, constitute an invaluable contribution to a better understanding of Babylonian divination." - Lorenzo Verderame, "Sapienza" Università di Roma, in: Aestimatio 8 (2011)

• CONTENTSChapter One Fate and Divination in MesopotamiaChapter Two New Evidence for the History of AstrologyChapter Three Canonicity in Cuneiform TextsChapter Four The Assumed 29th Aḫû Tablet of Enūma Anu EnlilChapter Five TCL 6 13: Mixed Traditions in Late Babylonian AstrologyChapter Six Benefic and Malefic Planets in Babylonian Astrology Chapter Seven Elements of the Babylonian Contribution to Hellenistic Astrology Chapter Eight Babylonian Seasonal HoursChapter Nine Babylonian Horoscopy: The Texts and their RelationsChapter Ten Continuity and Change in Omen Literature Chapter Eleven The Babylonian Origins of the Mandaean Book of the ZodiacChapter Twelve Scribes and Scholars: The Ṭupšar Enūma Anu EnlilChapter Thirteen Lunar Data in Babylonian Horoscopes Chapter Fourteen A Babylonian Rising Times Scheme in Non-Tabular Astronomical Texts Chapter Fifteen Old Babylonian Celestial DivinationChapter Sixteen The Heavens and the Gods in Ancient Mesopotamia: The View from a Polytheistic CosmologyChapter Seventeen A Short History of the Waters Above the FirmamentChapter Eighteen Periodicities and Period Relations in Babylonian Celestial Sciences Chapter Nineteen Conditionals, Inference, and Possibility in Ancient Mesopotamian ScienceChapter Twenty “If P, then Q”: Form and Reasoning in Babylonian DivinationChapter Twenty-One Divine Causality and Babylonian Divination