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The following 9 pages uses this file: Cavalcade Jean de Bourbon et Marie de Berry? The following other wikis use this file: Orientation Normal Horizontal resolution Retrieved from " https: Oppenheim' thinks these were only meant for the scribes who read the reports aloud to the king, since Esarhaddon never even claims to be literate.
But Esarhaddon probably was not altogether illiterate. This is also supported by the fact that some of these glosses in reports written during his reign by scholars of the inner circle are so elementary that a professional scribe hardly would have needed them, for instance SAA 8 It seems that at least Esarhaddon had a special routine for receiving reports, but perhaps it only applied to reports concerning eclipses due to their special significance.
The procedure is described in the letter LAS Regarding the report on the lunar eclipse about which the king my lord wrote to me: They used to receive and introduce all reports from astrologers into the presence of the father of the king my lord.
Afterwards, on the river bank, a scholar whom the king, my lord, Oppenheim p. Nowadays it should be done as it suits the king, my lord [. These two might even have belonged to the inner circle, which otherwise consisted of Assyrians: See further RLA 6 pp. In the petition ABL , reedited by Parpola , Urad-Gula describes the rise and fall of his fortunes and gives us some information of the payment of scholars.
He refers to the fact 1. But, according to a palace official, even the Chief Scribe's financial status Livingstone p. He is dying of a broken heart and falling out of the hands of the king, my lord, shattered. The poverty of the most learned of scholars, if the Chief Scribe is the same as the ummdnu of the king,' was proverbial.
The scholars were totally dependent for their positions and livelihood on the goodwill of the king, and this might lead to "humbleness and servile fear towards the monarch, and arrogance, hatred and contempt towards colleagues".
Ahigar is identified in the Seleucid king-list mentioned above see p. In the Ahigar story he is said to have worked for Sennacherib; and Esarhaddon, incited by Ahigar's treacherous stepson who says that a wise scribe is dangerous, orders his death.
Later the king regrets, and Ahigar is reinstated. The letters and reports certainly abound with flatteries - such as comparing the king to the sage Adapa 4 or even to Marduk, 5 and the scholars often express their devotion and dependency in exclamations like "Who is my god, who is my lord?
To whom should I be devoted but to the king, my lord! Old and trusted servants — this is how the scholars refer to themselves, and indeed the best description of their relationship with the king? Of course, this appeal, like all the letters, is couched in the most polite terms. He obviously deems the event irrelevant to the king and says so rather outspokenly: There is no evil in the palace, and when did the king ever visit Harihumba?
Only if there is something wrong in the palace should the ritual "Evil of Lightning" be performed. Did I not see earthquakes when I was young?
The god wanted to open the ears of the king. He should pray, perform the namburbu and be on the alert". The king might check obse rvations and interpretations sent to him by one scholar with another.
The very knowledge that the king might thus check their statements — even if it was only to get a "second opinion" — must have prevented the ' Leaving out an apodosis or two, see LAS II sub LAS The common idea of Machiavel Tian "priests" stage-managing politics' is hardly true.
The relationship of the scholars with one another was also not quite so bleak as has been supposed. Practically all the examples cited by Oppen- heim2 of scholars discrediting their colleagues could very well be interpret- ed to have just the opposite meaning.
The passage merely says: In SAA 8 , Akullanu writes: Now I have reported to the king everything that appears to me to be auspicious and that the safety of the land' with regard to the king my lord is good". His Babylonian compatriot Zakir again is perhaps a little overzealous, conscientiously sending a report SAA 8 with an omen of Scorpio and the moon explaining that "the omen is irrelevant ittum ul talappat ; but I reported it due to the watch of the king".
But all the Sargonid kings presumably demanded to be given exact information in these matters, and it was considered subversive not to report. The two astrologers watch the sky day and night but do not report anything about the king and the crown prince and have joined cause with the rebels!
The king might write to ask the scholars to explain themselves better 3 orevnqustihbraon,stechlwrae. The Babylonian exorcist Bel-le'i names a gatekeeper as witness to his observation of an unnamed planet in Taurus, apparently a very ill-portending omen SAA 8 The sky exists - - - - - - - - forever!
When the alu-disease came the king smelt a rat and blamed the scholars for not warning him. Since then they reported everything and "was not the king, your father, fully alive and did he not exercise kingship? In my opinion, the king did not feel a "latent scepticism towards divination".
If the king felt any scepticism it was towards his experts. In a literary text called "The Sin of Sargon", 3 Sennacherib relates how he gathered his diviners to investigate the reason why his father had been slain in battle and why the body was never found.
He explains how he let them inspect the same liver in groups of three and four, so that they could not discuss the matter with each other. The diviners all came up with the same answer, which surprisingly confirmed Sennacherib's suspicions — that Sargon had sinned by placing the Assyrian gods above the Babylonian.
He advises later kings to follow the same procedure. That diviners might indeed manipulate the divinatory process is illustrated in the letter SAA 10 They coerced him into performing lecanomancy to predict that the chief eunuch would become king.
The king had luxury editions of Enuma Anu Enlil. One king at least4 hadbotneiByladonAsrichte,wno ivory writing-boards, joined together to form a polyptych, available in the E.
In the letters, Assurbanipal is often encouraged to take a look for himself in the series. Urad-Gula attempts to flatter Assurbanipal's vanity by referring obliquely to the king's knowledge of EAE Parpola p.
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The omen quoted in this report is the very common one of full moon occurring on the 14th. Beside the scholars of the inner circle were the scholars less favoured and the ones situated around the realm in Assyria and Babylonia, even if we can not simply assume that all the reports written in Babylonian ductus actually came from Babylonia.
I see no reason why the Assyrian king should not have imported Babylonian scholars,' just as he imported their tablets. The king certainly got reports from Babylonia. He might check the validity of these observations with his "inner circle", e. N, 28 , a memorandum on scribes working on texts for the library at Nineveh. Some of these scribes are certainly Babylonian, for example a certain Ninurta-gimilli, of whom we hear that he has completed the series on which he was working and has been put in fetters!
The fragment SM 3 The lord of kings should write to Assur and all other cities, to Babylon, Nippur, Uruk and Borsippa, perhaps it was observed in those cities. Some Babylonian scholars describe themselves as "mar GN", i. Oppenheim 3 takeshiomn wrteisalocuydnthaiwe writing to the king, and this seems quite probable — at least I have found no instance where it could be shown to be otherwise.
Three such astrologers are known from Borsippa: The dateable reports of these scholars 4 suggest that they might have succeeded one another. No one identifies himself as mar babili, but from the contents of their letters and reports, some can be located to Babylon.
Tab-silli-Marduk calls 1 Akkad may be an alias for Babylon, as argued by Landsberger, but it is also possible that Mar -Istar actually was at the site of Akkad to supervise the reconstruction of Eulmag; Akkad was certainly not an observatory and Mar -lstar would only mention it because he had seen the eclipse there himself.
No reports have been found from either of these astrologers at Niniveh. Bel-upahhir refers to orders from the king which he received in Kar-Mulissu SM 8 This seems like a family of scholars from Babylon, as pointed out by Oppenheim,' all faithful to the Assyrian king.
Tab-silli-Marduk may be identified with a certain Tabija, the writer of eight reports and co-author with Zakir of the report SAA 8 ; this Zakir must have been in Babylon because he writes not only on astro- logical matters but on political developments in Babylon as well.
He also complains to the king about the persecution he endured from the rebellious Sillaja ABL , written in B. But in B. He writes in the letter ABL which deals with the lunar eclipse of Dec. There does not seem to be any political reasons — perhaps the astrologers there reported to Babylon?
I do not think that the astrologers in Babylonia reporting to the king were part of an organized network of observers — as seems to have been the case in Assyria see below. The Babylonian astrologers write on all topics of astrology and quote EAE to their hearts' content, just as the members of the "inner circle".
But when the king wanted to make sure ' Oppenheim p. And perhaps others as well: ABL no name was written in answer to a question from the king: The scholars and astrology in Babylonia existed independently of what king or dynasty might reign, their relationship with the king was opportunistic.
We have more petitions from Babylonian than from Assyrian scholars — which might be taken to indicate a less stabilized relationship with the king than that of their Assyrian colleagues.
The Assyrian scholars tend to be those most worried — most prone to looking at the sinister side. Both deal with the occultation of Jupiter by the moon 2, but while Akkullanu's report mostly predicts evil, Tabija's is all optimism, he omits one of the clearly relevant omens cited by Akullanu and edits away the word Subartu in another. We did not [see] the moon here, just because of the clouds.
Tabija, SAA 8 In various Assyrian cities, teams of scribes seem to have been ordered to keep the watch of the king and report to him. He re- ports on the appearance of the moon and the sun, conjunctions, oppositions and eclipses, often with date, never with an attempt at interpretation or citations from the scriptures.
There are two letters from the scribes of Kalizi writing collectively LAS 85 and 86 merely reporting their observation of the full moon with a short version of the relevant apodosis. They also complain about not being able to keep the watch of the king and teaching their students because of corvee-work ilku and tupfikku. One letter is particularly interesting because it mentions the mandate of the team LAS In LAS 81 we hear that he has been ordered to watch out for an eclipse.
Could that slight difference really have mattered, if it were at all noticed?
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Apart from that, the character of the reports from Nabu-musesi is different from that of the reports and letters from the teams. The position of these scribes was very different from that of the scholars of the "inner circle" and those in Babylonian cities, who certainly did not have to do corvee-work.
Their function was to corroborate obse rv ations which perhaps were mainly important to the regulation of the calendar but which of course also held astrological significance. Enmeduranki in his turn handed down his knowledge to the men of Nippur, Sippar and Babylon.
Ea, is said to have written on an ancient tablet tuppu mahru that the month of Dumuzu was suited for the gathering of armies and the pitching of camps. EAE had a human redactor, according to one tradition this was the mythic sage Adapa.
The similarity between this statement and Pirge Avot I: Sinai and handed it down to Joshua, and Joshua to the Elders, the Elders to the prophets, and the prophets handed it down to the men of the Great Assembly". The same process of sifting various local traditions may be re- ferred to in the subscript to one of the Babylonian traditions summarized in a hemerology from Assur, KAR iv 25 ff: The question of the exact status of the "received tradition" in the first millennium has provoked much discussion.
It would seem that, by the end of the second millennium, there was what Oppenheim called "the stream of tradition" — a fairly well-defined corpus of texts that from that time onwards was transmitted only by being copied by scribes. The colophons, from the 11th century onwards, show that the scribes took great care in copying their manuscripts exactly from the originals.
As far as can be judged from our present incomplete knowledge, the scribes only made minor changes, subtractions, or additioris 3 to the corpus, and they evidently strove for textual stability. There was consider- able leeway in the spelling of individual words, and to some extent also in the division of longer texts into tablets; but on the whole the "stream of tradition" remained fixed throughout the first millennium, in Assyria as well as in Babylonia.
It has become received tradition in Assyriology to refer to texts belonging to the "stream of tradition" as "canonical", which seems reasonable enough. The scribes appear to have considered them authoritative, insofar as any part of human knowledge could lay claim to that. They did not consider their texts divinely inspired; nor is there any evidence that they regarded any one edition of a text superior to others.
See Weidner Plt. The discussion is to some extent futile, partly because the texts are so broken, partly because most of them are so poorly edited. Copies of the series were prepared for the Ninevite libraries, but this was no attempt to create "official", normative, texts.
Within the "stream of tradition", the scribes distinguished three categories: The criteria for this distinction remain unknown; but all three categories seem to have been considered equally authoritative. There is much more cuneiform material than is needed for the reconstruction of EAEs about 70 tablets alone.
A huge amount of various kinds of scholia developed parallel to and around the canonical divinatory series, such as commentaries, excerpts and compilations from the series. Unfortunately we do not really know very much about the nature of some of the text genres listed below, to which much of the "extra" material must belong.
To some extent the classification is artificial, the different kinds of commentaries are clearly interrelated, but so much work remains to be done. Properly speaking this is not the ancient name of the series at all; it is consistently quoted by the Variant traditions are normally indicated by sang, "otherwise".
A remarkable case is KAR , cited above. When Anu, Enlil and Ea, the great gods, by their decision laid down the design of heaven and earth, and assigned to the great gods their functions, to create the day, to renew the month for mankind to behold, they saw Shamash in his gate, they made him appear regularly in heaven and earth.
The compilation of the series can be seen to begin already in Old Babylonian times, and it may well be that the process was more or less completed by the 11th century. Interestingly, the so-called astrolabe and the astronomical compilation Mul.
On the other hand, Mul. But it is only from the the Neo- Assyrian royal libraries that we have solid evidence for the contents and division of the series. CT 33 9, a Neo- Assyrian list of the stars of Enlil, Anu and Ea, also opens with a bilingual introduction, which seems, however, to give instructions for the use of the list.
See also the edition of tablet 14 by F. The sources go on differently after the mythological paragraph, but in all cases it is followed by the Shamash section see Rochberg-Halton p. There are many difficulties in reconstructing the series. One is that in many cases only parts of EAE were acquisited to the royal library, and some tablets were more popular than others, as was also the case with literary texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Not even the format of tablets was standardized throughout the series. Complete editions were of course prepared at Nineveh specially for the library. Hey thought that it was possible to establish a more or less rigorous systematization and suggested that the many divergences between older and younger copies of the same tablet, between contemporary copies, and the inconsistent numbering can be traced back to different Schulen, namely: N, 28 , a memorandum of scribes working on copies of various series for the palace libraries; also LAS and LAS Hipparenum and Uruk, and one from Strabo n which mentions only Uruk and Borsippa.
In his reconstruction Weidner used two catalogues, one from Assur and one from Uruk, and catchlines and incipits. The two catalogues are fragmentary and do not overlap. Only the incipits of tablet are preserved on the Uruk catalogue, the catalogue is used as guideline for tablet numbers, even though the texts and their colophons are not always in accordance with the catalogue.
Weidner sums up the differences between the Assur catalogue and what he reconstructs from Nineveh as follows: Assur Niniveh Assur Niniveh Tablet 39 44 50 56 40 45 51 57 46 52 55 62?
According to Weidner, 4 table"3ish wtemodifrngubs. According to another text from Nineveh it is tablet 35, and according to one text from Uruk it is tablet The numbering of individual tablets is not the only problem, but also their division of the text, e.
Recension B is known in manuscripts from Assur, See Oelsner p. To judge by the index of subjects of the lunar eclipse tablets Rochberg-Halton p.
Tablets 20, 21 and 22, all on lunar eclipses, are arranged in reverse order from what might be expected, tablet 20 containing the more elaborate protases — unlike, e. These tablets then follow each other directly. The exact wording of the protasis is of supreme importance.
Two tablets dealing with the same phenomenon but described in different terms would follow each other. They may have used: It is tempting to see it as a sort of index. Rikis girri was serialized as appears from ACh Sin In the commentaries the protasis commented upon is quoted together with its apodosis, sometimes in an abbreviated form.
The mukallimtu comments on the tablets of EAE in proper sequence. Comments to more than one tablet of EAE may of course be written on one commentary tablet, e. A commentary may deal with the interpretation of single words, as in ACh Ishtar 2: The commentary says lines , var. Venus is steady in the morning: Further examples may be found in Cavigneaux, "Aux sources du Midrash: EAE is the only divinatory series to have a named and serialized commentary.
Weidner' calls it "Die kommentierende Anschluss-Serie", which is an apt description since it does not just comment on individual omina, but also give general principles, e. Sin 19 contains a list of the parameters to be considered in the interpretation of a lunar eclipse see p.
Its special status can also be seen from the fact that it was quoted frequently in letters and reports and by almost all of the scholars' with no special reference, just as was the EAE itself. Further- more, it is not classified as a pi ummani commentary — whatever that means.
Tablet 2 is organized in three columns: Due to the state of publication it is impossible to know if this arrangement was peculiar to tablet 2; probably it was not.
Like the mukallimtus on individual tablets, it is a factual commentary and contains the same types of explanations of protases which are often imprecise or outright impossible. Loose language like "not at its appointed time", "not at the right time", "not in its season" is defined as exact dates in ACh Sin 3: As an example of the form and 1 p.
Saturn stands with the moon on the 14th day. But the omens did not only refer to conjunction of the moon with Saturn, but could equally well be applied to the opposition of the moon and the sun side by side with all the rest.
For instance, ACh 3: Jeyes' suggests that one of the objectives of the extispicy mukallimtu was to actually determine which description of a phenomenon was to be preferred. During its long history, the terminology of extispicy certainly had become no less confused than that of astrology. Extispicy mukallimtus apparently often quote an omen protases followed by other protases, differently formulated, which warrant the same interpretation.
It may originate in the school room as the teacher's answers to pupils' questions which were written down and thus passed into the written tradition. This is a late Babylonian commentary to EAE with the postscript sa-a-tu u. It contains both "philological" and factual explanations of both protasis and apodosis, but does not try to explain the link between them, such as is known from commentaries to other texts.
Undoubtedly, the word lists were consulted by the scholars, though not often mentioned explicitly. In LAS from three diviners , the king is asked to authorize a change in the curriculum of apprentice scribes: Excerpts of EAE and its commentaries, liginnu or liqtu, written on one-column tablets.
They often concentrate on a single topic, quoting See Livingstone p. Even though none of these are astrological, such texts surely existed. We know that tablets with omens relevant to particular celestial phenomena were written for the king see p.
A different kind of excerpted texts are the "compilations", multicolumn tablets that contain sections of omens of unrelated subject matter. Ahu, "strange, what is outside". As has been argued by Rochberg- Halton, 5 this should be understood as "extraneous", not "uncanonical", in the sense that ahu texts represented a parallel, perhaps less well-known, but not an inferior or less standardized tradition.
We have references to an ahu tradition in catchlines, subscripts, catalogues and also from the letters and reports though these references are few. K r18 Bezold, Cat. Tablet - - - - of Assurbanipal, etc. If it flashes from left to right: Chunks of extraneous omens were incorporated, or appended, to the canonical series.
But this section consists of omens from section I and III, rearranged in the order of the months instead of following the Venus cycle, but with the same wording except that uhhuru is in the present tense in sections I and III, in the preterite in section IV.
Three manuscripts do not contain section IV, and at least two manuscripts contain only section IV. Either tablet 63 was divided into two tablets in one recension BPO I p. EAE tablet 57 also included ahu omens: This line is followed by the colophon stating that this is tablet 57 of Enuma Anu Enlil.
From the comparison of protases made by Rochberg- Halton, 3 it emerges that they differ in the following respects: In addition to the examples quoted below, see also SAA 8 Nabu-musesi , unfortunately in broken context.
The extraneous material is thus in- corporated in both the series and its commentary. Others may be omina that merely had been left out by chance; or E.
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Copied according to its original and collated, tablet of Nabu-zuqup-kenu" seems to be a special case. This text is not astrological, but contains "omens from the reign of the king kar-le-em-me-tum-bi" that are indeed very strange: It is generally assumed 3 that the menology is secondary.
The astrologers also used the hemerologies to determine which days were good for a specific undertaking, such as good days for taking oath LAS 1 r. The astrologers may send excerpts from hemerologies, for instance lists of auspicious days, see SAA 8 nos. Among the several lists of stars, the most astrological is the so-called Great Star List for a transliteration and translation, see App.
This text is a motley of mythological and astrological data on planets and See e.
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Also SAA 8 , where Nabu-musesi quotes first three omens concerning Jupiter in the lunar halo, with the names sag. Then he quotes one with the third name of Jupiter, sul. The standard omen is probably found in ACh 2.
Much of it seems to have been assembled from blocks excerpted from other texts. For instance the section "Groups of Seven" lines ff recurs in KAR i ; and the word lists that conclude the text includes much irrelevant information, such as all the values of the sign Sl CT 26 43 viii 2' f0, though only the first entry SI: Its composite character indicates that the text is not very old.
Probably it was meant to serve as a vademecum for the astrologers. Normally the scholars do not give any references for their statements, and they certainly never indicate from which tablet of the series they quote.
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The scholars might say so if they quote extraneous omens or oral? Generally they only give their sources if they are a little out of the ordinary. Akkullanu, for instance, shows the attitude of a true archive-mole and quotes with evident pride a report written in B.
As to the rains which have been so scanty this year that no harvests were reaped, it is a good omen for the life and vigour of the king, LAS r Perhaps the king, my lord, will say: This formula is not altogether standardized. It states that knowledge of the contents of the tablet is reserved for the initiated, lit. The formula sometimes contains an injunction to the initiated to show it to other initiates.
In a sense, all astrology, including the series Enuma Anu Enlil, was certainly considered a part of the secrets of the great gods.
A certain scholar is reprimanded for teaching the temple slaves, and warned that if he persists he will do so on pain of the king's punishment.
SAA 8 , Asaridu jr.: Reading the commentary is the secret lore of the scholars. Written according to an old original and collated. But the text itself is apparently not very esoteric. On the obverse, some 20 lines with omens of the planet Mars remain. Some of the classified astrological texts are indeed scholia e. Borger2 wonders why some texts were considered secret or why certain texts, which were part of a series otherwise accessible to any literate person, were kept secret.
One may also wonder why others, which seem very esoteric to us, were not only one manuscript of i. But at the beginning of his studies, even a young student presumably had sworn by tablet and stylus to guard the secrets of the great gods. V plate 3, the first five lines in copy, see sub Ki , Lambert, JCS 21 , p. But it is obvious that practical experience was subordinate to theory or schematization: This testifies once again to schematic systematization.
Generally, it is good if a mostly well-portending planet, or a constellation representing such a planet, is bright, and bad if an evil-portending planet or constellation is bright, and vice versa if they are faint. A similar rule obtains in extispicy, even if is it not altogether consistent in its applica- tion: The ambiguity is one of emphasis in interpretation, whether the right side was primarily the favourable side, or primarily "our" side pars familiaris.
To the Assyrians, omens pertaining to both Akkad and Subartu referred to "us", at least in times when the Assyrian king was the overlord of Akkad, i. Elam and Amurru referred to "the enemy". Which quarter an omen pertained to was decided according to which month, day, or watch of the night it occurred, and which wind was blowing.
Also the planets and stars were allocated a region, but variant traditions existed side by side. An astrological omen was believed to be valid only for a specified period adannu , depending on the nature of the omen.
A lunar eclipse would apply for up to days see further below , while omens from the stars were only valid for 30 days. This might give some idea of which omina were considered more important, but the astrologers relatively seldom recommend the performance of apotropaic rituals, perhaps the instances we do have are atypical.
Very probably rituals were carried out more often than we can ascertain. The description is of course far from exhaustive and also rather a frustrating task since the astrological tradition is so full of contradictions and certainly does not swear by general rules. Balasi's remark LAS 35 that no two omens have the same interpretation, though said about month omina, might be applied to astrology as a whole.
But, as mentioned, to some extent generalizations did exist. In my presentation, I follow the order of the EAE. The Moon The moon plays a prominent part in Babylonian religion and astrology. The first twenty-odd tablets of the about 70 tablets of EAE concern the moon, the 8 last of these deal with eclipses, and about half of the astrological reports deal primarily with lunar phenomena.
The paragraph which concludes the section of the ME dealing with the moon — it is followed by the catchline of the first tablet about the sun — ' Cf. Boissier, Documents Assyriens, p. The king will be well.
He assigned to him the jewel of the night, to deter- mine the days: In the first of the month, as you light up over the land, you shine with horns to mark six days, on the seventh let the tiara be half.
On the fifteenth day, you shall be in opposition to the sun every middle of the month. Then, when the sun is looking at you from the horizon, wane, grow backward as is proper.
On the day of disappearance, approach the path of the sun so that [on the thirtieth day? The first sighting of the new moon heralded the beginning of the next The restoration offered by Vanstiphout, JCS 33 ff: Certainly the moon was conceived of as shining with its own light, but I do not think it can be concluded from the above passage that the Babylonians explained the phases of the moon the way Berossos did, as suggested by Burstein.
I know of no Babylonian astronomical explanation of the phases of the moon, and the naturalist theory may safely be ascribed to pseudo-Berossos drawing on Stoic philosophy, see Kuhrt p. B f0 and Livingstone, p. The beginning of the month was good seemingly regardless of the length of the preceding month , as in LAS A 'new day' is like the beginning of the month, it is favourable.
This is described in the letters and reports in two ways, either: Thus the day after the 29th could either be an abortive one hour 30th day which the moon by its appearance "rejected" and turned into the first day of the new month, or it could be a "complete" day if the new moon became visible for the first time the next evening.
The ominous content of the two possible durations of the month are briefly stated in ACh Sin 3: If the moon is seen on the first day: His arguments are also corroborated by SAA 8 The 30th is also dangerous iii 52 but Sin and Shamash will bless you if you pray to them and not to your own god.
The opposition of the moon and the sun could be described in many terms, the pragmatic: Full moon generally occurred on the 14th since it occurs on the average days after conjunction.
Many of the listed ty pes of tiara are obscure and may refer to different appearances. A planet or constellation seen within the halo of the moon acquires an ominous significance.
The omen was modified if the halo was not closed, but how much seems to have been a matter of opinion see p. Otherwise the dire consequences will be: Eclipses of the Moon Eclipses are of course very conspicuous, and they played a part in tradition and divination other than and independent from astrology — as can be seen also in the examples from Mari and Ugarit, mentioned above Chapter 2.
Eclipses seem to be bad in themselves, and are listed along with other evils that might befall mankind.
They were also already in the OB texts' predicted by astrological omens, by halos, 5 by the new moon appearing too early, 6 by the moon being very big, 7 or even by fog! This is the only example of an ominous event known to me that could itself be predicted by divination! As is well known, both lunar and solar eclipses were primarily omens of disaster for the king or his enemies, according to which form the eclipse took.
See CAD All p. The writer quotes EAE! The period adannu affected by an eclipse in the evening watch is three months and ten days, the period of an eclipse of the middle watch is six months and twenty days, the period of an eclipse of the morning watch is ten months.
An eclipse of the evening watch is for Akkad, an eclipse of the middle watch is for Elam, an eclipse of the morning watch is for Subartu.
These are the months of lunar eclipses. These are the days of lunar eclipses. When Sin makes an eclipse, you must also consider the month, the day, the watch, the wind, the path and the positions of the stars as they stood during the eclipse, and then you can give [.
This is explained by Munnabitu SAA 8 The evil of the 14th day: We do not know the quadrant where it began. The moon shed the extent? That its disc started to clear from the East and the North, means good luck to Subartu and Akkad. That it was covered completely means that the portent pertains to all countries".
There are two rules for the interpretation of the movement of the eclipse shadow incorporated into the EAE. According to tablet 15, the part of the moon where eclipse starts indicates the country that will be afflicted; according to the introduction of tablet 20 the opposite is true: But his inter- pretation of the month is agreed on by most sources.
B f0, ACh 2. B 1 ,' Munnabitu lists the significance of the quarters: The right part of the moon is Akkad, the left part of the moon is Elam, the upper part of the moon is Amurru, the lower part of the moon is Subartu.
There exist at least three different schematic interpretations of the points of the compass, 2 but only the two following are applied to eclipses.