Download The History of Science and Ancient Mesopotamia

doi 10.1515/janeh-2013-0003
JANEH 2014; 1(1): 37–60
Francesca Rochberg*
The History of Science and Ancient
Mesopotamia
Abstract: This paper views the relevance of cuneiform texts to the history of
science from inside, i.e., from the perspective of the available sources, as well as
from outside, i.e., from the perspective of historians of science outside the field
of Assyriology. It reviews some of the methodological problems that beset the
reconstruction of science in the ancient Near East as well as a way forward,
which acknowledges localism and pluralism as well the compelling continuity
from cuneiform traditions of knowledge to later counterparts (astronomy,
astrology, magic, astral-medicine). Cuneiform texts will not instantiate a universal or transcultural science but are essential if science is to be seen as
embedded in culture and history.
Keywords: astronomy, astrology, magic, medicine, episteme, science, localism,
pluralism, nature, ṭupšarrūtu
*Corresponding author: Francesca Rochberg, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of
California, Berkeley, USA, E-mail: [email protected]
I do not believe that there is any single approach to the history of science which could not
be replaced by very different methods of attack; only trivialities permit but one interpretation. Otto Neugebauer (1945)
1 The view from inside
Ancient Mesopotamia became relevant to the history of science with the rediscovery in the 1880s of the mathematical astronomy of the Late Babylonian
period. The Golden Age of decipherment and analysis, associated with the
Jesuit fathers Joseph Epping, Johann Nepomuk Strassmaier, and Franz Xavier
Kugler, was followed by the work of Otto Neugebauer, whose 1955 critical
edition of the corpus of cuneiform lunar and planetary tables and procedure
texts from Babylon and Uruk (Astronomical Cuneiform Texts, ACT) and theoretical presentation of the two methods of calculation, now known as Systems A
and B (Systems II and I in Kugler 1900) established a new foundation for the
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field. In 1975 A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy (HAMA) placed
Babylonian astronomy firmly in line with the tradition of Ptolemy’s Almagest,
and by extension all later Western astronomy up to Copernicus. Neugebauer
(1975: 349 and note 6) pointed out that
Epping fully realized the significance of his discoveries. The two columns from a lunar
ephemeris which he had deciphered, he said, “give us more information about Babylonian
science than all the notices from classical antiquity combined”–a fact which cannot be
emphasized too often. And he foresaw clearly that the new material would become of great
importance for ancient chronology, for Assyriology in general, and even for modern astronomy.
During the 20-year period between ACT and HAMA, the fruitful collaboration of
Neugebauer and Abe Sachs in the heyday of the Brown School of ancient
astronomy, as it can be informally called, together with the collaboration of
Asger Aaboe (1955, 1964, 1980, 2001) at Yale, saw further work on the mathematical structures, parameters, and methods of Babylonian astronomical texts,
both of mathematical and non-mathematical description, including Diaries,
Almanacs, Normal Star Almanacs, Eclipse Reports and Observational texts, the
so-called Non-mathematical astronomical texts (NMAT). Neugebauer and Sachs’
terminology mathematical and non-mathematical astronomy has by now
become standard in the field. The unfinished editions of the NMATs were passed
from Sachs to Hermann Hunger, who completed the herculean task of publication now available in Sachs–Hunger (1988, 1989, 1996) and Hunger (2001 and
2006) (see also Hunger 1999), the copies in Sachs–Pinches (1955).
A snapshot of the entire trajectory of the history of Babylonian astronomy
from the heroic times of the founding Fathers to the present is given in chapter 1
of Mathieu Ossendrijver (2012: section 1.1.3). Accordingly, phase one ran from
the discovery and decipherment of cuneiform astronomical texts in 1881–1935,
when Neugebauer and B.L. van der Waerden entered the field, and then to the
beginning of the most recent phase in 1990, when an understanding of
Babylonian science as including omen divination and horoscopes, as well as
mathematics and astronomy came to the fore. Social, cultural, and epistemological questions began to be asked of the astronomical material with the goal of
reconstructing not only the mathematical methods of Babylonian astronomy but
its nature as a cultural phenomenon, and as well, the role, status, and place of
its scribes in cuneiform intellectual history (Rochberg 2000, 2004; Ossendrijver
2011a and 2011b). Continuing this development, in tandem with the direction the
history of science as a whole has taken in the generation of scholarship since the
1970s, it becomes increasingly clear that not only divinatory but also magical
and medical texts belong to the scope of cuneiform science. Parallel and concurrent with the increasing acceptance of divinatory, magical, and astral
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medical texts into the framework of cuneiform sciences is another recent surge
in the explication of mathematical astronomy by John P. Britton (1987–2010), Lis
Brack-Bernsen (1969–2010), John M. Steele (2000–2011), Noel M. Swerdlow
(1998), and Mathieu Ossendrijver (2011–2012).
Certainly, one of the great advantages for the cuneiformist interested in the
history of science is the fact of the many extant and contemporaneous written
sources stemming from the Old Babylonian period through to the end of cuneiform writing itself in the first century C.E. and represented both in
Mesopotamian scribal centers and to the west (see especially the divinatory
texts from Emar, Rutz 2013, and the short descriptions in Rochberg-Halton
1988: 30–35 and Koch-Westenholz 1995: 44–51), north (Hittite omens, see
Güterbock 1987 and 1988; Rochberg-Halton 1988: 33–34, and Koch-Westenholz
1993), and east (Susa). The bulk of the Nineveh collection of scholarly texts,
generally referred to as the library of Assurbanipal, estimated in the many
thousands of clay tablets (excluding writing boards and other media), is of the
essence for the history of cuneiform science. Many of the tablets of the Babylon
Collection now housed in the British Museum and the Vorderasiatisches
Museum Berlin, as well as the tablets from Assur, the religious capital of the
Assyrian Empire, are also relevant, as are the Uruk texts of the Seleucid Rēš
Temple to the sky-god from the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods. These
collections shed light on the principal way in which observed or observable
phenomena were of interest to the scribes as divinatory knowledge, to do largely
with astral omens and extispicy, the inspection of the sheep’s entrails, other
forms of divination, astronomy and astrology. In particular, astral divination
and extispicy were the two scholarly disciplines supported by the Neo-Assyrian
imperial state and then preserved, to a greater or lesser extent, within the Late
Babylonian temples of Babylon and Uruk during the Achaemenid, Seleucid, and
Arsacid periods. Publication of many of these sources can be found in Hunger
(1992), Reiner and Pingree (1975, 1981 and 1998), Koch(-Westenholz) (2000 and
2005), van Soldt (1995), Verderame (2002), and Rochberg(-Halton) (1988).
In addition to the astronomical, astrological, and other divinatory sources, we
might also include the tradition of lexical texts within a cuneiform intellectual
history that bears on the history of science. Although different in focus and scope
from any other scholarly corpora, lexical lists were also collections of knowledge,
that is, of terms, synonyms, grammatical forms, and other categories of lexical
information, both Sumerian and Akkadian, essential to the work of cuneiform
scribes (Veldhuis in press). They certainly formed a large part of the repertoire that
was serialized and passed down as an essential part of scribal scholarship.
The many diagnostic and therapeutic medical texts must also be included as
part of a broad base of sources relevant to a study of the cultural formulation of
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knowledge in the cuneiform context (e.g., Biggs 1990; Finkel 2000; Heeßel 2000,
2005 and 2008; Geller 2010a and 2010b; Finkel and Geller 2007; Scurlock 2006;
Scurlock and Andersen 2005). Related thematically and in aim both to the medical
and to the divinatory repertoires, magical texts, including such text types as namburbis (Maul 1994) and incantations were integrally connected to the whole of scribal
knowledge. Understanding the intersections of omen divination, magic, medicine,
and the hermeneutics that methodologically join these disciplines to the lexical
material and to each other will be key to writing a history of cuneiform science in the
future. In essence, the totality of scribal learning, kullat ṭupšarrūti “everything
pertaining to the scribal art,” is source material for the history of cuneiform science
as seen from a more or less internal perspective.
The entry of ancient Mesopotamia into the history of science from the point
of view of the sources, therefore, began with astronomy because, being quantitative and rigorously predictive, those materials were found to be continuous
with the later tradition of exact science and could be fitted to a somewhat
modern model of scientific knowledge. At the time of cuneiform astronomy’s
rediscovery, the history of science was oriented toward an account of how
modern science came to be, thus setting the tone for a mid-century admission
of Babylon to its ranks. Later, however, the view of science in history expanded
and a wider set of evidence became relevant to that broader conception. The
content and methods of cuneiform astronomical texts then came to be viewed as
part of the practices and purposes of scribal-scholarly learning as a whole. The
resulting holistic approach to cuneiform intellectual historical sources, therefore, sees astronomy together with divinatory texts, horoscopes (Rochberg 1998),
astral-medicine, and other kinds of divination (extispicy, morphoscopy, terrestrial omens, etc.), all representative of a system aimed at understanding the
interconnection of human, divine, and world, both in its physical aspect and its
textual representation. Essential to this historiographical approach is the dissolution of former demarcations between science and other forms of knowledge
or practice, to be discussed at greater length below (Section 4), which need to be
set aside for a reconstruction based on the contents of a cuneiform, not the
modern, scientific imagination.
2 Methodological problems for a cuneiform
history of science
There are, however, a number of problems that attend the history of science in
the ancient Near East methodologically. One is the lacunose nature of the
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abundant texts–and this pertains not only to the tablets themselves, which are
frequently broken and fragmentary, but also to the great gaps in chronology and
geography in between groups of sources. Astronomical texts are a case in point,
as the corpus of ephemerides and procedures that formed the foundation of our
knowledge of Babylonian astronomy cluster in the Seleucid Period, with few
texts bridging the gap to earlier periods, such as the earlier first millennium
compendium MUL.APIN (Hunger and Pingree 1989). Scattered astronomical
texts from the 6th to the 4th centuries analyzed most recently by John Britton
(2008, 2009, 2010) represent intermediate stages before the fully developed
systems of Babylonian mathematical astronomy emerged, but a continuous
narrative for the history of astronomy in ancient Mesopotamia is far from
attainable. If other traditions are taken into consideration, for example the
divinatory texts, gaps in continuity are also the rule.
Another problem of methodological approach is how to understand the
relationship of the cuneiform scientific texts to the history of Western science.
There is no question that the whole complex of the Babylonian celestial sciences
were important foundation stones for the astrologia, astronomia, and mathematike of the Hellenistic period (Bowen 2013: 299 note 1) known from Greek and
Latin texts, as the founding fathers of the modern decipherment of Babylonian
astronomy made clear. The mathematical astronomical texts from late Babylonia
(from ca. 500 BCE onward) are now considered an indisputable part of Western
astronomy, and the astrological tradition of the Babylonians, which was also
clearly known to Greco-Roman writers, is a significant part of that science. In
fact, however, some traditions of knowledge represented in cuneiform texts can
be seen as ancestral to both Western (geographically west of the “Near East” and
including the Western Mediterranean regions and Europe) and Eastern (geographically from the Hellespont and the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to the
Indus Valley) sciences, therefore including Byzantine, Islamic, and Indian
sciences (Pingree 1997).
It bears mention in the context of the history of science that despite the
evidence of continuity from the ancient Near East to the later West, to the
biblical and the classical worlds, ancient Mesopotamia is not reducible to a
Western framework, indeed has a somewhat ambiguous identity as Western. In
the preface to his Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, A.L.
Oppenheim (1977: 1–2) drew attention not to kinship with The West but rather
to the unique and alien nature of the civilization reflected in cuneiform sources.
Other Assyriologists have made similar remarks, such as Simo Parpola’s comment on “deep cultural differences” in the introduction to his edition of the
Neo-Assyrian royal letters (1970: xviii). “No translation,” he said, echoing
Landsberger’s notion of conceptual autonomy,
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no matter how good it is, can make these texts familiar or immediately understandable to a
modern non-technical reader. One is bound to admit the existence of a cultural barrier
which can be–even partially–removed only through a more thorough acquaintance of the
texts themselves or related documents from the same period.
Against the grain of those who emphasize continuity and familiarity over discontinuity and strangeness, some cuneiform evidence was included in Helaine
Selin’s Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in NonWestern Cultures (2008). There are entries on “Astrology in Babylonia,”
“Medicine in ancient Mesopotamia,” “Mathematics in Mesopotamia,” and
“Geometry in the Near and Middle East.” Coverage of the ancient Near East in
the volume is uneven, and the authors of the entries, with the exception of Jens
Høyrup (“Geometry in the Near and Middle East”), are not specialists in cuneiform texts. Selin, however, understood this material as appropriate within a
non-Western framework, and the inclusion of those entries, as well as Eleanor
Robson’s “The uses of mathematics in ancient Iraq, 6000–600 BC” in the other
of Selin’s edited reference works, Mathematics Across Cultures: the History of
Non-Western Mathematics (2000), is indicative of a shift in thinking about the
cultural identity of ancient Iraq, or Mesopotamia. Among the writers on ancient
Iraq in Selin’s encyclopedias of Non-Western science and mathematics only
Robson addressed the question of the ambiguity of Mesopotamia’s cultural
identity, saying (2000: 95), with respect to mathematical texts, “since its discovery in the early twentieth century AD, this mathematics has been treated
implicitly as part of the ‘Western’ tradition; even now one finds ‘Mesopotamian’
mathematics categorized as ‘Early Western mathematics’, while Iraqi mathematics in Arabic, some of which is directly related to its compatriot precursors,
appears under ‘other traditions’ (e.g., Cooke 1997).”
In addition to the fragmentary or lacunose nature of the cuneiform sources
and the question of how to position the evidence vis-à-vis the West is the
historiographical question of the very nature of the investigation of “the history
of science” in the ancient Near East. That is, if the project is defined as a
reconstruction of science in Babylonia and Assyria, what exactly is being reconstructed? Of course, the question is not new. Peter Dear’s “What is the History of
Science the History of?” comes to mind. As he said (2005: 390),
Rather than studying the history of something that we always knew in advance how to
identify, historians of science have turned more and more to studying how that “something” itself has been formed as a historical object, with no permanent, transcendental
identity. Everything thus becomes historicized and contingent, and the days of the history
of science as an apologetic or celebratory enterprise serving present-day science have
become, so to speak, a thing of the past.
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Unlike the sciences derived from the classical tradition, it is an even more
awkward kind of history where the very category for identifying what evidence
is relevant or not is not an internal or native category at all, but an artifact of a
different time and a different culture. In using this non-native category, we must
be conscious of our own filtration of the evidence and realize that, rather than
aiming to discover in ancient Mesopotamia that which we always knew to be
science, we have the opportunity to allow cuneiform texts to suggest other ways
in which knowledge was valued and phenomena were understood, and so to
further expand our ideas about the nature of science historically.
Because there is no science, whether taken as knowledge, practice, or
method, to bring back from cuneiform texts as something to which the scribescholars themselves were consciously committed, we cannot, strictly speaking,
extract from these sources a narrative about what kind of, or how, science
happened there from anything like a “native” point of view. Again, this problem
is not at all new. Peter Harrison (1998: 8–9) remarked already that “historians of
science … frequently concern themselves with ‘an imaginary object’, constructing it from a variety of texts and heterogenous disciplines … it needs to be
recognized that ‘science’, as we understand it, does not have a history which can
be traced back beyond the seventeenth century.” Science, therefore, from a
historical viewpoint, is something other than what we now understand it to
be. Consequently, whatever we imagine for the ancient Near East must be
congruent with its historical evidence, but what we deem relevant as evidence
has clearly shifted over time as modernist demarcation programs emphasizing
dichotomies of science/non-science and the rational/irrational have been laid
to rest.
If, in good postmodern fashion, we have given up our commitment to
absolutes, facts, and a continuous teleological narrative with all its potential
for anachronistic distortion of historical evidence, we need not give up trying to
understand what various historical actors’ interest in the phenomenal world
was. And if interest in phenomena–physical, metaphysical, observable and
imaginary–is the stuff of a newly historicized and redefined science, then we
still have work to do for cuneiform texts. There are cuneiform texts that can still
be approached with the conceptual tools we bring to the study of other scientific
corpora, i.e., observation, explanation, rationality, and prediction, if only to
delimit their differences and attend to their particular orientation toward phenomena. More specifically, if celestial and other forms of divination, as well as
magical texts and related knowledge compendia, the plant compendium
(šammu šikinšu, see Stadhouders 2011 and 2012) and stone compendium (abnu
šikinšu, see Schuster-Brandis 2008) for example, are to be taken into account
with the totality of “the history of science” in the cuneiform world, a standard of
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criteria for knowledge that is discontinuous with that of science as defined from
the early modern period onward must be recognized. What we want to know
now is what the ancient scholars’ epistemic criteria were, as well as their
motivations and aims, not necessarily as measured against modern counterparts, but, when there are resonances, obviously, we take note.
The first millennium scholars’ very construal of the set of phenomena
appropriate to their interests sometimes diverges rather radically from what we
would expect from physical science. In omen texts, we are confronted both with
physical and with non-physical things, i.e., imaginary or otherwise unobservable celestial or terrestrial phenomena (Rochberg 2009, 2010). We must resolve
this divergence from our sense of the purpose of scientific inquiry by investigating the aims of this and other corpora of knowledge. Observation of phenomena
was motivated largely by an interest in ominous signs, not the desire to causally
account for those phenomena. And because there was no conception of nature
to provide a framework of laws or forces to account for such causes, the scribes
did not seek to explain phenomena in a causal way (Rochberg 2011).
Explanation in the cuneiform intellectual world had other aims, generally hermeneutic in character (Frahm 2011).
From a methodological point of view, therefore, the history of science for the
cuneiform world, since the heroic era of the Jesuit Fathers, Neugebauer, and the
exact sciences, has begun to accommodate multiple sets of sources, requiring
multiple approaches to the material, in keeping with Neugebauer’s own reflections on the matter, as expressed in the statement quoted in the epigraph,
above.
3 The view from outside
The historiography of Babylonian astronomy not only deals within the framework of the cuneiform corpora of knowledge (ṭupšarrūtu) but also belongs to a
wider “scientific oikumene” constructed of the ancient Near East, the Western
Mediterranean, Egypt, and India (Pingree 1978, 1998). Analytic and synthetic
treatments of Babylonian scientific texts by cuneiformists are therefore of value
from outside the immediate field of cuneiform studies. Arne Hessenbruch’s
Readers’s Guide to the History of Science (2000: 196) took note of “Egypt and
Mesopotamia” with the following statement:
Mesopotamia and Egypt used to be poor relations in the history of science, useful only as a
foil for the so-called Greek miracle, the birth of real science and mathematics. However,
new archaeological discoveries, the study of newly-uncovered texts, and reappraisals of
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those already known from the point of view of an enlarged range of questions have
changed this image in the last few decades. More than in other areas of the history of
science, older syntheses and the popular expositions based on them may prove to be at
best obsolete, or even misleading.
By the turn of the millennium the field had indeed entered a new phase, one
changed by some new sources but principally by a new historiographical sensibility, alluded to in Section 2, above. But Near Eastern knowledge corpora,
certainly no longer a foil for their Greek counterparts, still present us with
problems of understanding, because that mass of textual source material does
not speak in our customary language of science, that is, of the kind of knowledge scientia or episteme are supposed to represent, nor of nature or a clearly
defined notion of the physical.
In the same Reader’s Guide to the History of Science, under “Greece: General
Works,” the position of Near Eastern science vis-à-vis Greek is mentioned again.
There, Elmer Yglesias (2000: 311) pointed out that the period just post-WWII saw
a marked increase in the attention given to ancient Greek science, and soon
thereafter, according to the general outlines of the entry, ancient Near Eastern
science was introduced to the field by Neugebauer, whose Exact Sciences in
Antiquity of 1969 Iglesias, I think unfairly, deemed “narrowly internalistic.”
From the late 1960s and early 1970s to the early 1990s, Geoffrey Lloyd
established a new foundation for the study of Greek science with a series of
books from Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek
Thought to Demystifying Mentalities and Problems and Methods in Greek Science
(1966–1991). With reference to Lloyd’s work, Yglesias pointed to the progressive
engagement of the history of science with anthropology, philosophy, and social
history, that is to say, not the internalist work of those interested in Babylonian
astronomy. Lloyd’s attention to methodological and historiographical issues set
an intellectual stage for the special issue of Isis in 1992 entitled “The Cultures of
Ancient Science,” with contributions by Pingree, Lloyd, Martin Bernal, Heinrich
von Staden, and Rochberg. This collection of papers was something of a breakout piece, in which the ancient Near East was given a hearing in the premiere
journal of the American History of Science Society alongside ancient Greece.
There von Staden offered a key methodological critique for the very
approach to Greek science still valuable today for ancient science in general
which he termed the problem of “affinities and elisions.” He showed that
historians of ancient science privileged Greek science over that of other
Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures at their own risk of distortion, particularly when it resulted in the claim to the invention of science and the scientific
method. These claims, he argued, would not have sat well with the ancient
Greeks themselves, whose scientific writers show an awareness of, interest in,
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and influence by what Arnaldo Momigliano (1990) famously termed “alien
wisdom,” most notably but not only that of Egyptians and Chaldeans. Von
Staden’s paper, however, was not only aimed at Hellenocentrists. As he said
(1992: 582), “‘Hellenocentrism’ is but one manifestation” of more fundamental
problems that “arise from the oft-tacit interpretative deployment of ‘affinity,’
‘continuity,’ and ‘origin’–notions conditioned in part by the history of the
modern reception of classical antiquity.” These problems, we can say now in
looking back, are the consequence of a modernist history of science geared to
accounting ultimately for the origins, roots, and rise of modern science. Pingree
developed his argument against this position, calling it “Hellenophilia,” providing, as he put it (1992: 554), “an apologia for my claim to be a historian of
science with as serious and thorough a purpose as are the topics that we usually
find discussed in history of science classrooms or in the pages of Isis.”
While affinities, continuities, and origins became important from the point
of view of writing the history of science backwards, so to speak, from the
modern perspective, the essential asymmetry and difference between the modern and the premodern eras created a gap, an intelligibility gap – what Ernest
Gellner called the Big Ditch – between two “worlds,” in the sense that we find a
plurality of invalid world systems of traditional cultures before the Ditch but a
single true world system of science after (1979: 145–47).1 One of the major
missing ingredients in the cultures that do not see the world as we do is the
recognition of the discrete nature of nature with its own operative forces and
laws. Though the absence of a notion of nature means that the cuneiform
cultural perspective on the physical world and its phenomena has some fundamental differences from that of later Western science, the kinship between these
traditions, particularly in the astral sciences, can enlarge our view of the
scientific enterprise.
Iglesias took the 1992 Isis symposium as indicative of a changing perspective,
where Greece would be viewed in the larger context of the whole of the ancient
Mediterranean, including the ancient Near East, or really, Babylonia and Egypt.
“The Cultures of Ancient Science,” as the issue was called, did point toward an
emergent pluralism, as well as an enlarged framework for thinking about science
in antiquity that has become normative since that time. China too, already of
course a subject for the history of science in its own right, took on added
importance, as Lloyd (1996, 2006) and his collaboration with Nathan Sivin
(Lloyd and Sivin, 2003) showed, in reaching out beyond the boundaries of
Hellas for a broader understanding of the nature of ancient science as a whole.
1 He called it (p. 146) “one colossal, or should I say, abysmal, chasm,” and see also, idem
(1982: 188–200).
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It is not only that the history of ancient science has come to recognize a
wider geographical framework for its evidence, one that sets both the cuneiform
and the classical and Hellenistic Greek sciences within a wider cultural ambit,
indeed within the framework of West and East writ large, but the progressively
historicized view of what science knows, does, and is, has changed the way we
identify, read, and understand ancient texts relevant to what we think of as the
history of science.
4 Local knowledge and pluralism
The change in the conception of ancient science is the result of broader intellectual trends, the so-called interpretive, social, and linguistic turns, the work of
new historicists, post-structuralists, the sociology of scientific knowledge, constructivism, local knowledge, science as practice, concerns about presentism,
and, generally speaking, an all around drift toward various pluralisms. For the
historian of premodern and non-Western sciences, the most important turn is
the turn away from both a universal notion of science as transcendent of culture
and the assumption that such a universal science is instantiated by Western
science. Thomas Kuhn looms very large in this process. No doubt he was the
single greatest game changer, as many have said many times. Kuhn’s Structure
of Scientific Revolutions (1962) explicitly committed to granting other people their
“worlds,” particularly how their historical and cultural ways of knowing and
describing created variable “worlds.” This shift of focus on difference and
discontinuity in the content and values of knowledge over time and across
geographical boundaries raised new questions for the interpretation of ancient
science, and insisted that it be understood on its own terms, not simply as a
precursor, certainly not an immature version of later science. Clifford Geertz
deserves mention in this context as well, as his thoroughgoing pluralism and
focus on the local mirrored this change in the history of science. Referring to the
aim of science he said (2000: x):
The notion that the surer grasp of unshapely and incongruent, even unique, particulars is
as proper an aim of science as the abstractive formulation of exceptionless regularities–
and is, often enough, more illuminating as well–has grown steadily more acceptable over
the last quarter century [referring to the period from 1975 to 2000] as rationalism stumbled,
positivism evaporated, and the “prism face of Newton” (the image is Wordsworth’s) faded
from view. The notion that all knowledge aspires to the condition of mathematical
physics … lacks the air of simple obviousness that it had even a few short years ago.
Everything, from the philosophical reconsideration of the nature of natural law to the
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spread of perspectival, observer-dependent explanation, has strengthened the claims of
case-based knowledge to scientific standing.
He was referring here to the nature of science, but the implications for its history
are clear.
One of the major effects of the change in the game is that the aim and focus
of the history of ancient science is no longer simply to trace the ultimate origins
and roots of modern science. Cuneiform astronomical texts, in their role as
directly antecedent to Western astronomy, may once have earned their place
in the history of science precisely on the basis of this intimate and significant
connection between ancient and modern. But the singling out of astronomy,
particularly mathematical astronomy, as the Mesopotamian contribution to the
history of science did its share in reinforcing the conception of the history of
science backward from modernity to antiquity. Late Babylonian astronomy
became a powerful symbol of what the ancients could accomplish, and seemed
on the face of it to testify to the fact that Babylonian scientific aims were
consistent with ours, i.e., to obtain knowledge and predictive control of phenomena and to discover their autonomous “laws.” Because the ancients were
attempting to describe or predict the same phenomena as later astronomers did,
viz., the periodic synodic appearances of planets, the first visibility of the moon,
etc., the question of what it was the ancients observed and perceived about
these natural objects, and why, was not, in the modernist historiographical
mode, raised as a historical problem.
The value of Babylonian astronomy to the history of science, once tied to its
status as the earliest chapter in a story of the development of Western planetary
theory is now rather that it can show how much more complex the relations
among various aspects of the Babylonian intellectual culture were. And the
aspects we used to identify as scientific and those we did not suddenly do not
appear so dichotomous. Late Babylonian astronomy is no longer viewed as an
isolated corpus of scientific mathematical ephemerides, more or less easily
translatable to Western counterparts. The Babylonian theory of the planets, as
Noel Swerdlow pointed out in the introduction to his 1998 book of the same
name, had its cultural place in a world of diviners and temple benefices. The
multiple epistemic values of Babylonian astronomical science, therefore, especially those not obviously congruent with later astronomical science, are the
ones now most in need of explication.
The turn away from what is essentially an ahistorical presumption of scientific universalism became the postmodern turn to localism and an interest not
only in the culturally embedded nature of knowledge of all kinds, scientific
included, but in various practices that can be classified as scientific in some way
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as well. The postmodern strategy to historicize, to challenge absolute standards
or criteria, and to recognize pluralities is seeing an even further normalization
and intensification for the history of ancient science. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, in
an article dramatically entitled “I am Knowledge. Get Me Out of Here! On
Localism and the Universality of Science” (2011: 590) pointed out that the
construction of science as a local phenomenon not only implies its representation of that locality and how it may differ from others, but that this perspective
has necessitated changes in what we count as scientific practice. What may be
even more important for historians of the local domain we call the ancient Near
East, however, was his (2011: 590, my emphasis) statement, that “rather than
referring to some universally shared internal logic of science and invoking the
existence of ‘nature’ and neutral empirical data derived from it as non-problematic explanatory notions, science is now explained by reference to the factors
that can be found … in particular localities.”
The idea that cultures can be relative but science, and with it nature, is
universal does not go without saying and has in fact been challenged in the
historiography of science going back, once again, to Kuhn, who voiced the need
to render even nature in accordance with historical context, as we see in a
statement published in Conant and Haugeland’s Road Since Structure (2000:
220–21, my emphasis):
…the gap that I have here described as separating the Greek heavens from our own is the
sort that could only have resulted from what I earlier called a scientific revolution. The
violence and misrepresentation consequent on describing their heavens in the conceptual
vocabulary required to describe our own is an example of what I then called incommensurability. And the shock generated by substituting their conceptual spectacles for our own
is the one I ascribed, however inadequately, to their living in a different world. Where the
social world of another culture is at issue, we have learned, against our own deep-seated
ethnocentric resistance, to take shock for granted. We can, and in my view must, learn to do
the same for their natural worlds.
This, however, lacked the force with which Bruno Latour (1993: 106) proclaimed,
manifestolike: “From cultural relativism we move on to ‘natural’ relativism.” Of
course it could be suggested that a relativity about nature is subsumable under a
thoroughgoing cultural relativism. No matter. Latour worked this subject persuasively in his provocative We Have Never Been Modern and seems to have
been the first to employ the term “natures” to represent a plurality of conceptions derived from anthropological and historical approaches to science. But the
idea was in the air, as we see in a statement of Joseph Rouse, in an article two
years prior to We Have Never Been Modern that questioned why “narratives of
modernity” in the history and philosophy of science were so difficult to root out
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and overcome. There (1991: 162) Rouse went so far as to suggest that “the idea
that there is a ‘natural world’ for natural science to be about, entirely distinct
from the ways human beings as knowers and agents interact with it, must … be
abandoned.”
Countering the picture of an ahistorical and abstract authoritative canon of
science, local knowledge within a variety of historical and social contexts has
been in the foreground now for a generation of historians. In part, this was a
consequence of the very shift in aim from determining how our present scientific
state of the art came to be, to what the nature of knowledge was in former
periods. With greater refinement and subtlety in the approach to the history of
knowledge, there comes a recognition that what episteme meant to Aristotle or
scientia to Augustine, or the Scholastics, was different in each case. Similarly,
knowledge for the cuneiform scribes in the Sumerian or Akkadian idiom is not
the equivalent of, or counterpart to, episteme or scientia. Instead, the crux for a
cuneiform epistemology is in what was considered the object of knowledge,
especially when words and signs were of central interest. Nevertheless, whatever
we can reconstruct or infer even partially about what knowledge was in the
cuneiform context should take its place alongside other staples of the history of
premodern science and epistemology.
5 The order of nature and the object(s) of
scientific knowledge in ancient mesopotamia
Both nature’s definition and its attachment to science, especially to modern
science, have been at the foundation of the history of science since its inception,
when the goal of the field was to formulate an account of the origins and rise of
modern science. But how, a priori, can we assume that all historical science had
nature as its object of inquiry and the understanding of how nature operates as
its goal? I do not think enough has been done yet to answer this question,
though Lloyd has certainly taken us further in several recent monographs,
principally in his Cognitive Variations (Lloyd 2007) and Being, Humanity, and
Understanding (Lloyd 2012), where (2012: 64) he challenges the claim that an
explicit concept of nature was necessary to all scientific inquiry, citing precisely
Mesopotamia and China as examples of how science could exist, even thrive,
without it.
Historians of science cannot afford to take the nature of nature as selfevident. What we make of the natural world is a direct function of our historical
and cultural ways of knowing, and our linguistic ways of describing. Nature
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functions as a category with varying boundaries and contents cross-culturally
and historically, yet seems to be particularly endemic to Western cultures
descended from the classical world. In ancient Mesopotamia, as in any number
of premodern and non-Western cultures, engagement with the natural world did
not give rise to a term for nature, nor to a conception of nature as an independent objective reality. While it is true that a separate domain, equivalent to what
we call nature did not have its own word in the perceptual/conceptual/linguistic
world of the ancient Near East, a variety of texts reflect various ways of systematically looking at what we call natural phenomena in that cuneiform world.
If indeed the compendia of ominous signs, medical therapies and incantations, pharmacological ingredients (URUANNA ¼ maštakal), plant and stone
lists, as well as astronomical texts both mathematical and non-mathematical,
and later astrological and astro-medical works belong to science in ancient
Mesopotamia, the objective of that knowledge can neither be defined in terms
of nor reduced to a desire to know or explain nature. Nor can the practices
associated with these handbooks and compendia be assimilated to the various
objectives of later natural sciences, or even natural philosophy, namely, to
understand the order of nature, nature’s laws and causes, or the relationship
between nature, man, and God. These are not epistemic motives or scientific
values that fit the picture created by cuneiform sources of “knowledge,” or
science, nor of its practices, whether associated with divination at the NeoAssyrian court, or with the nightly watch of the heavens in Babylon from the
Eighth to the First centuries B.C.E., or with the complex tradition of medical
treatment, fully integrated with the use of “magic.”
In sum, with regard to pre-modern sciences not derived from the classical
tradition, fundamental assumptions about science as a form of thought, a
method of inquiry, a set of practices, or indeed as an inquiry whose object is
nature and natural phenomena construed in a particular (Western) way, are ripe
for reassessment. For the premodern and non-Western context, a historicized,
pluralized, and relativized view of science with an equally historicized,
pluralized, and relativized notion of nature is key to taking account of other
cultures’ ways of thinking about and describing the phenomena of interest to
them, be they heavenly bodies, sheep entrails, plants, stones, or the behavior of
animals.
In his recent defense of pluralism in the history and philosophy of
science, Hasok Chang (2012) rejects both monism and reductionism in scientific
theory on the basis of the utter complexity of nature and our attempts to
understand it. He has offered that the monistic view of nature was but a stage,
if a necessary stage, in the development of science. He said (2012: 255, emphasis
in the original):
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It is possible that science needed to be launched on the strength of hubris, which made the
whole enterprise seem both doable and worth doing: that we could grasp the truth about
nature! Perhaps early scientists needed to believe that nature was fundamentally simple
enough for them to be able to understand it. Newton had God on his side and proceeded
with the faith that there was one truth about God’s creation and with the grace of God he
could find it–how else would anyone muster the conviction that one simple equation could
cover all the universe?
And so it makes sense as one looks at the progress of science since the Scientific
Revolution, using the term here as a convenient chronological marker, to question the utility and even validity of such monism and/or reductionism. For the
ancient Near East, though, we are in even less familiar terrain, both before God
and before Nature. So, if cuneiform materials are to be included in the history of
science, the whole framework that joins science to nature, whether monistically
(à la Newton) or pluralistically (à la Chang), must be altered. What seems
unavoidable is that whereas no assumption seems more fundamental to our
conception of science than nature, if we are to embrace a pluralism about
science, we also ought to consider a pluralism about nature, and to acknowledge the anachronistic nature of referring to it in the context of the ancient
Near East.
In order to get inside the culture of cuneiform science, or knowledge, and to
be able to redefine a conception of science (or knowledge) in Babylonian and
Assyrian texts, what may once have been considered epiphenomenal – things
like the use of divination as a legitimizing tool of the state, the scope of the late
Babylonian scribes’ expertise in texts from incantations to ephemerides, the
continuous preservation of millennia-old traditions of omens, not to mention
reconstructing familial connections and networks among the scribes of Uruk or
of Babylon – all these things should be taken into ever greater account as we
further explore the cuneiform texts and contexts in which it makes sense to
speak of culturally embedded knowledge (science).
Peter Harrison noted (1998: 8–9) that “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.” The contexts and methods that
characterize ancient Mesopotamian knowledge of what Harrison called “natural
objects,” roughly for the fifteen hundred years before the Common Era, have
quite a number of parallels to what he described for the first fifteen hundred
years. That is, natural objects–or what we call natural objects–were classified
within a framework of things and kinds that had significance as signs coming
from the divine for the benefit of human society. Cuneiform testimony about
signs and portents did not yet draw lines between or around the natural,
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supernatural, or preternatural, none of which domains can exist in the absence
of a conception of nature itself. However, the body of objects of inquiry found
in cuneiform divinatory or other texts, indicating what was regular and what
irregular and within what sort of ontological framework such distinctions were
meaningful, will contribute to, once we have pieced this together more comprehensively, a historical epistemology useful both for a better, or more culturally oriented, understanding of the relation of ancient Mesopotamia to
science, and for the history of science as a whole.
A final point: To invoke the notion of “the history of science as a whole”
would seem to belie my postmodern commitment to pluralism and skepticism
about the meaning of any sort of decontextualized or universalized science.
However, there is much about the cuneiform investigation of phenomena that
resonates with later traditions of natural philosophy and science. After all, other
cultures, the Greek and the Indian most directly, adopted any number of ideas
and practices from the body of knowledge and its practices attested in cuneiform, from omens to astronomy and astrology. Therefore, despite localism and
pluralism, there is as well a compelling continuity about some traditions in the
history of science, suggesting that there may be a (post-postmodern?) historiographical position to be found between two extremes – a “Third Way” – where
we relinquish the idea of science as a universal or transcendent fact, yet we do
not reduce it to nominalistic particulars, where we give up on the grand
narrative of the steadily progressive rise of a reified science, but acknowledge
where transmission occurred and where continuities exist, and where we can
agree, with the sociologists of scientific knowledge, that a science as defined by
modernist philosophers never existed, but find that many kinds of science have
existed, instantiated by the evidence from many periods and cultures of history,
including ancient Mesopotamia. The postmodern irony of there being no science
in ancient Mesopotamia because there was no word for it nor conception of it
does not mean that we cannot try to understand what about its textual remains
resonates with, even contributes to, what for us is a more culturally embedded
notion of science and its history.
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