The Babylonians viewed the fourth Quadrant of the zodiac, home to Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces, as an area called ‘the Sea.’ The deities they called Apkallu or wise ones, were associated with each of these constellations. However, knowing that all of the characters of our mythologies originated in the sky, we can look to the constellations for an answer. The Mesopotamian Valley is one of the first agricultural civilizations and while Astrology was born in this region, zodiac signs can be found in petroglyphs at Gobekli Tepe and Ratnagiri that date back to 10,000BC.īabylonian Astrology developed around 1250 BC, but the Sumerian names of their star catalogue reveal how people were decoding the night sky during the Bronze age.Įach of these cultures also portrayed deities carrying square bags which is puzzling. In the same way the modern bible was consolidated, rewritten and re-interpreted over the many centuries, what we read about Astrology today, is a homogenized and watered-down version of more ancient story. Most of our myths can be traced to celestial phenomena described by the Sumerians and perhaps, older and unknown cultures. In fact, today, we are discovering how many Greek stories, such as Perseus and the Hydra, came from the way cuneiform script can have several meanings. Long before the Greek’s were translating Sumerian words into myths, the Babylonian’s were cataloguing the stars. On that scale, looking back thousands of years to understand what the ancients wrote about astral phenomena is like reading a postcard sent to us, just a few days ago. We are also seeing the light of stars that took tens of billions of years to reach the earth. Even today, we can trace the same celestial highway, and observe the cast of characters as planets and constellations that gave rise to the many stories that shaped our earliest beliefs. The starry sky has always captured our imagination as a place of wonder and inspiration. By decoding the night sky – we can understand the world the way the ancient’s viewed it. The night sky connected cultures across great distances because we were observing the same stars. We can use it to peer both, forward and backward in time. We are the Babylonians – and we can read the stars."Īstrology is a way of exploring the evolution of the human imagination, and what ultimately became its myths and religions. "To understand us, you must decode the night sky. It attributes both Pleiades and Taurus to month 2, both Orion and Gemini to month 3, and both Pegasus and Pisces to month 12.But we carved three bags at the top so that they might remember. This document equates the twelve months of the year with the signs of the zodiac, and is an important stage in the development of the system as we know it today. The system developed gradually, but by the end of the 1st millennium BC underpinned the whole of astrology as well as astronomical science. Our twelve-part zodiac derives from ancient Mesopotamian ideas and images, some of which already occur among divine symbols in the 2nd millennium BC. Through these channels the influence of Babylonian scholarship was eventually felt from China Crucial to the preservation of Babylonian knowledge was its translation into other languagesĪnd scripts: first Aramaic and Greek, then Arabic and Sanskrit. Our division of hours and minutes into sixty units is a direct descendant of ancient Babylonian systems of counting and measurement.īy the first century AD the cuneiform script was all but extinct. You can see a quintessentially Babylonian idea on every clock and watch in the world today. Some aspects of this legacy, such as astrology, are no longer considered scientific, but others, in the fields of mathematics and astronomy, have stood the test of time. Babylonian learning has left its lasting influence on modern culture. Curator's comments The art of measuring land the sunclock and the sundial, and the twelve divisions of the day, came to Greece not from Egypt but from Babylonia.
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