Fwd: [agade] BLOGS: "Pleiades in Mesopotamian divination & their legacy in zodiacal literature"

[Eshbal Ratson]

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From: <Ag...@listserv.unc.edu>
Date: Sat, May 13, 2023 at 2:33 AM
Subject: [agade] BLOGS: "Pleiades in Mesopotamian divination & their legacy in zodiacal literature"
To: The Agade mailing list <ag...@listserv.unc.edu>

From Mathieu Ossendrijver <mathieu.os...@posteo.net>:
======================

The project "ZODIAC - Ancient Astral Science in Transformation" (Berlin) has published a new blog entry:

"Before the zodiac: the Pleiades in Mesopotamian divination and their legacy in zodiacal literature"
by Maria Teresa Renzi-Sepe
URL:
https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/zodiacblog/2023/04/24/before-the-zodiac-the-pleiades-in-mesopotamian-divination-and-their-legacy-in-zodiacal-literature/

Studying how celestial bodies were conceptualized in Ancient Mesopotamia before the emergence of zodiacal literature can aid our understanding of the cross-cultural, global spread of the zodiac. This is especially true in the case of the stars said to be “in the path of the moon,” a list of seventeen constellations through which the moon passes during its monthly route across the sky, according to the cuneiform MUL.APIN, an astral compendium of the second millennium BC. Twelve out of these seventeen would appear as the Babylonian zodiac at the end of the fifth or beginning of the fourth century BC.

Among the stars “in the path of the moon” but not included in the Babylonian zodiac, the first in order are the Pleiades, a cluster of stars in the north-west of the constellation Taurus (see fig. 1 and 2), which take their modern name from the seven sisters, the daughters of Atlas, from Greek mythology. As the subject of my forthcoming book entitled “The Perception of the Pleiades in Mesopotamian Culture”, the case of the Pleiades was a way to explore, through an intertextual approach, the conceptualization of celestial bodies before its transmission in the cuneiform zodiacal literature.

The Pleiades play a significant role in cuneiform celestial omens, inferences based on analogical relationships. These omens are collected in the divinatory series Enūma Anu Enlil (EAE), literally “When Anu (and) Enlil”, a composition dated from the Old Babylonian period to the end of the first millennium BC. From celestial omens, it emerges that the Pleiades and their phenomena (i.e., conjunctions, luminosity, dates of rising
and setting) were thought to influence the outcome of the harvest through positive or adverse events predicted according to several analogical principles –calendrical, symbolic, or graphic.

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