The earliest sophisticated astronomy arose in ancient Babylonia, in central Mesopotamia, and there are three reasons why it happened there rather than, say, in ancient Greece. First, in Babylonia astronomy had an important social function: the gods sent signs from heaven to warn the king about impending war, a bad barley harvest, or an impending epidemic. In the early 2nd millennium BCE, the pattern of taking celestial omens was already established. This was long before the rise of personal astrology; whereas common people might have taken signs from their surroundings—for example, by observing the behaviour of animals—the celestial signs were intended for the king and kingdom alone. The Greeks were no less superstitious than any other ancient people and saw omens in the flight of birds, in dreams, or in the frenzied utterances of an oracle, but they had no early custom of celestial divination. That came later, in the Hellenistic period, after contact with Babylonian wisdom. Second, there was in Babylonia a civil service charged with things astronomical. Temple scribes, who were often priests, watched the sky every night to keep track of what transpired, and they recorded their observations. Third, in Mesopotamia there existed a stable technology for recording data—the clay tablet. As long as they are protected from water, clay tablets are practically indestructible. The acquired data also had a secure place for storage (the temples), and broken tablets were recopied. All of these circumstances—a social function, a bureaucracy charged with doing astronomy, and a secure system for data storage—were missing in the early Greek world.
By the 7th century BCE, astronomical diaries were in existence. These recorded the results of night-by-night watching by the temple astronomers, such as when a planet passed by the Pleiades or another reference star, when Venus reemerged from its period of invisibility (after having been too near the Sun), or when Jupiter stood still and went into retrograde motion (that is, reversed direction). These ancient Babylonian observations were not very precise, but it is far more important to have a long run of observations than to have precise ones.
Within a few generations, Babylonian astronomers had achieved the ability to predict the behaviour of the Moon and the planets. Though no planet repeats its motion from one year to the next, repetition does occur if one waits long enough. For example, Venus does not go into retrograde in the same month or in the same sign of the zodiac from one retrogradation to the next. The pattern does not repeat until after 5 complete retrograde cycles, which take about 8 years. Similarly, Mars starts a new repeating pattern of retrogradations after 22 cycles (which take 47 years), and Saturn repeats its pattern after 57 retrogradations (59 years). This discovery gave rise to the Babylonian goal-year texts. Supposing that one wanted to predict the behaviour of all the planets for the year 2025, which would be the goal year, one could look back in the records and find what Venus had done in 2017 (8 years earlier), what Mars had done in 1978 (47 years earlier), and so on. Thus, the first predictive planetary astronomy was achieved with a good database by making use of repeating patterns.
By about 300 BCE the temple scribes achieved a far more sophisticated method of predicting planetary behaviour on the basis of complex arithmetical theories. For each planet there are several different versions of the planetary theory preserved. The basic idea was that a key event, such as the onset of retrogradation, could be thought of as an object in its own right that worked its way around the zodiac. For example, in one version of the Babylonian theory, Jupiter’s onsets of retrograde motion were spaced at regular intervals of 30° though about half the zodiac (in Jupiter’s slow zone) but at 36° intervals in the remainder of the zodiac (Jupiter’s fast zone). A scribe could use this theory to rapidly work out the dates and positions in the zodiac of the onsets of Jupiter’s retrograde motion for a century or more.
Credit : Britnnica
Picture Credit : Google
