Mathieu Ossendrijver, "BM 76488 - a Babylonian Compendium about Conjunctions and other Planetary Phenomena", in: John Steele and Mathieu Ossendrijver (Eds.), Studies on the Ancient Exact Sciences in Honour of Lis Brack-Bernsen, Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2017, 127–146

Abstract

This paper discusses the cuneiform tablet BM 76488, which partly preserves a hitherto
unknown Babylonian compendium about planetary phenomena. In several of the preserved
sections, periods are assigned to pairs of planets – a topic not attested elsewhere in
Mesopotamian astral science. The analysis presented here suggests that some of the periods
describe the empirical behavior of planetary conjunctions.

Published In

John Steele and Mathieu Ossendrijver (Eds.), Studies on the Ancient Exact Sciences in Honour of Lis Brack-Bernsen, Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2017