Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science

By Francesca Rochberg

In the modern West, we take for granted that what we call the “natural world” confronts us all and always has—but Before Nature explores that almost unimaginable time when there was no such conception of “nature”—no word, reference, or sense for it.
 
Before the concept of nature formed over the long history of European philosophy and science, our ancestors in ancient Assyria and Babylonia developed an inquiry into the world in a way that is kindred to our modern science. With Before Nature, Francesca Rochberg explores that Assyro-Babylonian knowledge tradition and shows how it relates to the entire history of science. From a modern, Western perspective, a world not conceived somehow within the framework of physical nature is difficult—if not impossible—to imagine. Yet, as Rochberg lays out, ancient investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies clearly established an axis of knowledge between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world. Rochberg is the first scholar to make a case for how exactly we can understand cuneiform knowledge, observation, prediction, and explanation in relation to science—without recourse to later ideas of nature. Systematically examining the whole of Mesopotamian science with a distinctive historical and methodological approach, Before Nature will open up surprising new pathways for studying the history of science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226406275

Book preview

Before Nature

Before Nature

Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science

Francesca Rochberg

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40613-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40627-5 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226406275.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rochberg, Francesca, 1952– author.

Title: Before nature : cuneiform knowledge and the history of science / Francesca Rochberg.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016019567 | ISBN 9780226406138 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226406275 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Assyro-Babylonian literature—History and criticism. | Science—Assyria. | Philosophy of nature—Assyria. | Learning and scholarship—Assyria. | Astronomy, Assyro-Babylonian.

Classification: LCC Q125 .R716 2016 | DDC 509.35—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019567

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dedicated to the memory of my father,

George Rochberg

1918–2005

Molto affettuoso

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Ancient Near East, Science, and Nature

PART I. HISTORIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER ONE

Science and Nature

CHAPTER TWO

Old Ideas about Myth and Science

PART II. CUNEIFORM KNOWLEDGE AND ITS INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORK

CHAPTER THREE

On Knowledge among Cuneiform Scholars

CHAPTER FOUR

A Cuneiform Modality of Order

PART III. RATIONALITY, ANALOGY, AND LAW

CHAPTER FIVE

The Babylonians and the Rational

CHAPTER SIX

Causality and World Order

PART IV. THE CUNEIFORM WORLD OF OBSERVATION, PREDICTION, AND EXPLANATION

CHAPTER SEVEN

Observation of Astral Phenomena

CHAPTER EIGHT

Prediction and Explanation in Cuneiform Scholarship

CONCLUSION

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Map of the Ancient Near East

INTRODUCTION

The Ancient Near East, Science, and Nature

The aim of this book is to raise and explore questions about observing and interpreting, theorizing and calculating what we think of as natural phenomena in a world in which there was no articulated sense of nature in our terms, no reference or word for it. This seems to be the case in the cuneiform world. What I mean by the cuneiform world is nothing more (or less) than that which is represented by the cuneiform corpus of the Babylonian and Assyrian literati, the scholarly specialists in bodies of knowledge relating to the phenomena.

The sources in question come from a variety of textual corpora produced by elite Assyro-Babylonian scribes from the last two millennia BCE. While the texts of these diverse corpora have their distinct content, form, purpose, orthographic style, intellectual goals and attitudes, the phrase the cuneiform world can serve to evoke the context of cuneiform scholarship in contrast to that of other corpora from antiquity. The purpose of raising questions of knowing, predicting, explaining, and interpreting the phenomena is to reflect on the nature and aim of knowledge in cuneiform sources and the relationship between that complex body of knowledge and the broad scope of the history of science.

The project of coming to some comprehension of an intellectual culture in which the conception of nature did not occupy the enormous place in the organization of the world as it does today, or has since early in the history of Western natural philosophy, may not seem to intersect with or impinge upon the history and philosophy of natural science virtually by definition. If we are to pursue the history of science beyond the boundaries of the Western classical tradition into the ancient Near East, obviously the category nature was not native in these parts, and our histories of the engagement with natural phenomena in the ancient Near East need some further explication of the framework in which such phenomena were understood.

Geoffrey Lloyd argued that the idea of nature as a domain inclusive of phenomena occurring in the nonhuman-made environment was an invention of the Greeks.¹ Edward Grant viewed nature as a given, not an invention.² But however given the phenomena of the physical environment might seem to some of us to be, the ways in which such phenomena are seen, understood, and described are a function of a specific intellectual and experiential orientation toward the world around. As such, nature is not a static concept, and the content and form of science in history is vivid testament to that fact. Still, one would like to understand what it means to say that Assyro-Babylonian inquiry into the phenomena belongs to science, when nature, in any way comparable to other historical conceptions or usages of that category, was, in the terms of cuneiform texts, not the object of inquiry.

The basic historical question, therefore, is: If science is understood as the inquiry about nature and its phenomena, how do cuneiform texts relate to the larger framework of the history of science? A related philosophical question is: What kind of science is it that does not have nature as its conscious object of inquiry? And finally, from the point of view of the cultural values we attach to science and scientific knowledge, we might ask in what way can knowledge that is not consciously directed at nature be usefully counted as science?

There is much existing scholarship on the relation between natural philosophy and science, but less has been said about these questions. It seems to me that the cuneiform corpus presents a different reference point from any other body of systematized knowledge and should be considered on its own with respect to the usual historical sources for telling the story of science. Although posed from three vantage points, the questions raised here can be reduced to one fundamental one—namely, what is the relationship between cuneiform knowledge—and knowledge practices—and what we call science? How to understand cuneiform knowledge in relation to science without recourse to later ideas of nature is the leitmotif of this book.

The scribes interested in the phenomena of their particular surrounding environment as signs—phenomena such as eclipses, animal and bird behavior, the features of the human form, or the appearance of the liver of a sacrificed sheep—were engaged in the world in a way that immediately resonates with any number of historical sciences in their use of observation, analysis of regularities and anomalies, calculation, and prediction. It is this particular orientation to the world expressed in and through the textual output of the scribal elite of Babylonia and Assyria, the literati of those societies, that concerns the following chapters.

If there is a place for the cuneiform world in the history of science, it is not to be defined only in terms of astronomy, for which the Babylonians were famed in antiquity and admired in modern times. The clay tablets containing the work of scholars specialized in the calculation of lunar and planetary phenomena belong to a wider tradition of cuneiform scribal learning focused on a vast array of phenomena, not only those of the heavens. Indeed, the cuneiform scholars’ inquiries produced diverse bodies of knowledge for the study of signs, for medicine, magic, and astrology, and employed all the varieties of reasoning that we now associate with rationality and with science, that is, empirical, inductive, deductive, and analogical.

The field of the history of science has already come to terms with major change in the idiom of science and its objects of knowledge over the longue durée. The meaning or understanding of technical terms of scientific discourse, such as mass, lunar latitude, or eclipse, change over time, and some, such as phlogiston, celestial spheres, or the luminiferous ether fall away entirely. The meanings of episteme for Aristotle, or scientia for Augustine, or for the Scholastics, are not applicable to other contexts of scientific discourse outside their own. Some room in this epistemic plurality, therefore, has to be made for the language of the Assyrian and Babylonian scholars if the terms nēmequ or ṭupšarrūtu, roughly knowledge (of skills, of bodies of scholarly texts) and scribal learning, or scholarship, respectively, can even be considered in relation to other historical ideas of knowledge.

In setting the cuneiform corpus and its native epistemic discourse alongside those of other premodern scientific cultures, a certain kinship between knowledge and methods of knowing developed in the cuneiform world can be identified with those of later periods. To describe relation in terms of kinship implies more than borrowings and parallels, which have long been identified between Babylonian and Greek, or even later antique and medieval tradition. It implies what Marshall Sahlins called mutuality of being, that is, in his words: kinfolk are persons who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence; they are members of one another.³ What I argue for is membership for cuneiform knowledge within the family of knowledge systems, ways of knowing and engaging with the world of phenomena, that make up the history of what we call science.

Kinship, however, does not imply sameness. In reflecting on the nature of knowledge in cuneiform sources and the related question of its relationship to the broader scope of the history of science, an important dissimilarity or discontinuity to be recognized is that the object of cuneiform knowledge was not conceived of as nature. The fact that what we consider to be the realm of nature with all its phenomena did not always provide the framework for scientific knowledge is one idea that so far has not been taken up as a serious historical question. To more fully depict and elucidate the nature of cuneiform knowledge in terms of its own objects of inquiry, however, this question must be considered.

The concept of nature has a long and complex history and has represented the framework for the world construed in various ways, including or not including gods, or God, taken as self-moving or as materialistic. Clarence Glacken said the word ‘nature,’ as everyone knows, has many meanings in Greek and Latin and in modern languages. With all of its failings it is a grand old word.⁴ He went on to say: "When Huxley wrote Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), he discussed man’s place in the evolutionary scale of being. When Marsh wrote Man and Nature in 1864 he described the earth as modified by human action. Sometimes the word is synonymous with the physical or natural environment; sometimes it has a more philosophical, religious, theological aura than these more matter-of-fact terms express. Occasionally it attains grandeur as in Buffon’s reference to it as ‘le trône extérieur de la magnificence Divine.’"⁵ R. G. Collingwood prepared his lectures that eventually became The Idea of Nature (1944) over the course of the 1930s, leaving the manuscript unfinished at his death. His book opens with the statement: In the history of European thought there have been three periods of constructive cosmological thinking; three periods, that is to say, when the idea of nature has come into the focus of thought, become the subject of intense and protracted reflection, and consequently acquired new characteristics which in their turn have given a new aspect to the detailed science of nature that has been based upon it.⁶ The assumption that science is the result of the focus of thought upon the idea of nature poses a problem for the astronomy/astrology, medicine, magic, and divination from the two millennia prior to Collingwood’s three periods of European cosmological thinking. In the context of the cuneiform world, I propose, the prehistory of the conception of nature is not found to be the equivalent of the prehistory of science.

In Raymond Williams’s Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the words nature and culture were both singled out for their semantic and historical complexity. Culture, he deemed one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,⁷ but nature—

Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language. It is relatively easy to distinguish three areas of meaning: (i) the essential quality and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings. Yet it is evident that within (ii) and (iii), though the area of reference is broadly clear, precise meanings are variable and at times even opposed. The historical development of the word through these three senses, and the main variations and alternatives within the two most difficult of them, are still active and widespread in contemporary usage.⁸

Parsing the meanings and usages of the word nature is complex for all the reasons given by Williams. But when the conception of nature becomes a tool for understanding systems of thought that do not, or did not, make use of the term, yet another degree of complexity is added to the mix. It is our term, our conception, our tool of understanding. Of course we are free to use whatever intellectual tools we have at our disposal, but, to quote Williams again, The complexity of the word [‘nature’] is hardly surprising, given the fundamental importance of the processes to which it refers. But since ‘nature’ is a word which carries, over a very long period, many of the major variations of human thought—often, in any particular use, only implicitly yet with powerful effect on the character of the argument—it is necessary to be especially aware of its difficulty.⁹ In pursuing a line of inquiry into the history of science as it might relate to cuneiform knowledge and cuneiform intellectual practices, it seems to me particularly necessary to be especially aware of the difficulty of assuming that, like most sciences we know of, cuneiform knowledge had any stakes in knowing nature.

If anything seems fixed in our minds, here in the modern scientific world, it is nature, and with it, the dichotomy of nature and culture. We seem to need one to define the other. The appeal of and to this dichotomy culminated in the famous expression nature versus nurture of eugenics creator Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century.¹⁰ It remains a deeply rooted given in some quarters until today. Many tropes and debates about human behavior still point to a division into internals and externals predicated on the idea of the material realities of nature inhabiting our bodies (genetic material, bacteria, amino acids, chemical reactions) while we create and inhabit social worlds. Other ways of seeing how nature and culture interact or intersect in the human being have long been central to philosophy on the question of where nature as matter falls in relation to the human mind. The duality of nature and culture once thoroughly underpinned anthropological discourse, epitomized as Lévi-Strauss’s fundamental structures of the human mind. Terence Turner saw that Lévi-Strauss conceived the nature-culture relation ambiguously as both external and internal: externally as a boundary between human culture and the world of nature beyond the village; and internally as the psychological divide between the mental processes of perception and association and the consciousness of the cultural subject.¹¹ Nature and culture, as Turner made clear, remained separate and distinct ideas for structuralism.

Geoffrey Lloyd’s recent reassessment of the dichotomy, or what he called some dichotomy between nature and culture, raised the question of how universal to human thought and experience the dichotomy really is:

On one line of interpretation it would be the nature/culture division itself that would be an underlying assumption common to all societies, though then it becomes important to consider whether or how far there are culture-specific differences in the apprehension of that dichotomy. The opposing line of argument would have it that that dichotomy is a typical example of the imposition of Western categories on other people’s world-views, though that then raises the problem of whether those views are incommensurable with our own. Either way, a first observation would be that we seem to have to make room for a variety of view-points on the question for two distinct reasons. First, there are . . . societies where there is no explicit concept of ‘nature’ as such at all, though that should not be confused with a denial that they have an implicit grasp of that domain. Second, how ‘culture’ is interpreted also varies remarkably, even before we take into consideration the fact that primatologists and others claim that certain species of animals possess culture at least in a restricted sense.¹²

Lloyd’s suggestion that room be made for other viewpoints on how the world is understood to be constituted is of the essence for explicating texts from ancient Assyria and Babylonia that have to do with the observation, interpretation, and calculation of many phenomena, and thus, I would argue, for the analysis of the practice of science in the ancient Near East.

The inception of science was once thought to begin with the invention and study of nature in the Greek philosophical milieu. The remarkable achievements of the late Babylonian astronomers in the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods were a primary mitigating factor in the revision of that narrative. But in the course of the four-thousand-year-long civilization of the ancient Near East, for two thousand years of that prodigious period, diverse efforts to describe, understand, schematize, and calculate aspects of observable, possible, and conceivable phenomena are attested in forms of Assyrian and/or Babylonian divination, medicine, and astronomy/astrology. In their own terms, these efforts, however, did not explicitly focus on nature, nor did they require that their objects of inquiry be explained in terms of that separate domain, or of what we would consider to be natural causes. A science not focused upon nature so as to understand nature’s independent existence and functioning is not something we are used to considering, but cuneiform texts force this consideration upon us.

If the epistemic goal of science is to understand, consciously, the workings of nature, where are cuneiform texts to be placed, and how are they to be understood within science’s history? The problem lies not only with the term nature, but also with the term science. The ways we conceive of the meanings of both of these terms are insufficient for encompassing cuneiform intellectual culture with its particular forms and practices of knowledge, reasoning, and values. Just as naturalism provides one way to understand the world, there was another way attested in the cuneiform Near East. What that way was is expressed by the interests of scholarly cuneiform texts dealing with phenomena.

This book does not set out to translate nature into a cuneiform idiom; that is, it does not seek to find the counterpart to the conception of nature in cuneiform texts. It does not take up the history of the conception of nature in order to demarcate just exactly when it made its first or clearest appearance. It does not try to modify a definition of nature to accommodate cuneiform textual evidence. It does attempt to discover another way of understanding cuneiform scholars’ interest in their phenomenal world, the things that were known as the result of the particular aims of their knowledge, and why the study of the ancient cuneiform scholars’ interest in phenomena can repay us in a broader and deeper understanding of the history of science and the scientific imagination.

The title Before Nature requires a few further words of clarification beyond what has been said. In the middle of the last century, as the commitment to sociocultural evolutionism waned in anthropology, but scientism still soared, a collection of essays was published by Henri Frankfort, H. A. Groenewegen-Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, and William A. Irwin titled The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay of Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (1946). The volume was reissued in 1949 by Penguin under the more evocative title Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. In the paperback edition, Before Philosophy was widely disseminated and became authoritative as a depiction of a distinctive cognitive-intellectual character for ancient civilizations—namely, Mesopotamia (geographically equivalent for the most part with Iraq), Egypt, and Israel, in contrast to that of the better known Greeks and Romans. The thesis of a special ancient Near Eastern cognitive attitude (called primitive in accordance with the terms of the day) was formulated in terms of what and how various groups of people (designated by the quasi-national divisions, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel) thought about humankind’s place in the world of nature and in relation to the divine. It was not, however, portrayed as an intellectual history of the ancient Near East inasmuch as philosophy and science were not regarded as having taken root there, hence, Before Philosophy.

Based on an evolutionary approach to the relationship between culture and mind, what Before Philosophy aimed to describe and analyze was rather an essential form of ancient Near Eastern civilization in terms of its stage of cognitive development. Despite its particular cognitive-historical reasons for a separation of ancients from moderns—evidenced principally in the use of the word primitive to designate ancient thought compared to modern—Before Philosophy, written by distinguished archaeologists and philologists, was nonetheless an attempt to reach an understanding of this ancient thought-world not in terms of Western models or constructs (though how successful that was can be debated) but from within the various worlds of its sources. The book’s claim that scientific thought was developmentally excluded in these cultures was based, however, on an analysis of mythological and religious texts, as well as on the use of mid-twentieth-century standards in defining what counted as scientific thought. According to the cognitive history of Before Philosophy, thought in the ancient Near East lacked cogency of reasoning, was wrapped in imagination, and tainted with fantasy. What the Frankforts found lacking was, in particular, the capacity for abstraction. Ancient thought was classified as prescientific, the result of a failure to separate nature from culture, two domains that in their view and according to their time were clear and distinct.

Times have changed. For historians, sociocultural evolutionism and scientism are long out of fashion. The highly cultural and particularly Western nature of nature has been acknowledged. From a historical viewpoint it becomes increasingly difficult to see a direct and simple connection between science as knowing subject and a pure realm of nature as its object of knowledge. Nonetheless, the very idea of science still seems to imply or even depend on a concept of nature and on inquiry aimed at knowing it. The question of the nature and aim of the cuneiform scribes’ inquiry into phenomena before the name nature was given to any separate and discrete order of being or knowing is therefore central to this book.

The present study did not set out to be in dialogue with the Frankforts, or with Thorkild Jacobsen, Sumerologist and mythographer, who wrote the essay on Mesopotamia in that collection. But I soon saw that engagement with the Frankforts would be especially useful as a point of departure for the present discussion of science and nature with respect to ancient Mesopotamia. What is particularly problematic about Before Philosophy is that it purported to offer a synthesis of ancient Near Eastern ideas concerning human beings’ relation to (what we distinguish as) the physical and the metaphysical, and how various social groups of Near Eastern antiquity interpreted their experience, yet no evidence for a direct engagement with physical phenomena, such as astral or other omens, or astronomy itself, little known to nonspecialists (even less so than it is today) at the time of The Intellectual Adventure’s writing, was brought to bear. The discussion focused on mythological texts as evidence for a lack of scientific thought. There is, however, much more textual evidence that the ancient cuneiform scribes were fully engaged in the study of many more phenomena than can be represented in their mythological texts. Even in view of this greater scope of material, the Assyrian and Babylonian conceptual world cannot be so easily mapped onto our own, nor is our desire to classify things into natural phenomena or natural kinds useful for explaining what interested the cuneiform scribes.

The sources for the present study are wholly distinct from those of Thorkild Jacobsen’s essay. My discussion focuses on Akkadian cuneiform texts that deal with a variety of phenomena (physical and nonphysical, that is, hypothetical, imagined, possible, and conceivable phenomena) as objects of inquiry, and which, among other things, concerned prediction from and prediction of those phenomena. Such texts include a broad spectrum of omens, both celestial and terrestrial, and together constitute the quintessential form and also the bulk of scholarly learning in cuneiform culture. Also included are the texts we classify as astronomical, or astronomical/astrological, magical, and medical. These were all part of the vast literature the scribes of the first millennium termed ṭupšarrūtu, the art of the scribe, or scholarship, the intellectual province of the master scribe, the ummânu, that is, expert, or scholar. The history of ṭupšarrūtu itself exhibits shifts and changes in the treatment and understanding of phenomena over its long history.

The relation between cuneiform knowledge and science has both historical and philosophical dimensions. The philosophical dimension comes from contemporary concerns with understanding the nature of science, but contemporary concerns have deep roots in ancient Greek philosophy that were tied to the conceptual realm of nature. The historical dimension is supplied by clay tablets that anywhere from four to two thousand years ago were written by scribes inhabiting the cities of what is now mostly Iraq. There is also the later filtration of some of these sources in our Western intellectual heritage from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. These two dimensions, the historical and the philosophical, in my view, interestingly intersect in this context.

On the historical side the intellectual heritage of the West begins in the ancient Near East, and so there is already reason to look for ways in which the cuneiform inquiry into the phenomena of the world on one hand and of later science on the other might be, in Sahlins’s terms, members of one another.¹³ The Hellenistic reception of Babylonian astrological and astronomical traditions not only perpetuated aspects of cuneiform knowledge but also created new traditions anchored in but not wholly defined by such knowledge.¹⁴ The idea of Babylon as the source of astronomical science is a common thread. One of the latest vestiges is found in the thirty folios of the Liber Nimrod, a work in which the fictive astronomer Nimrod, perhaps the latest exemplar of the topos of the wise Babylonian astronomer, teaches, mostly in mythological terms, his disciple, Ioanton, aspects of astronomy and cosmology.¹⁵ Although Nimrod is derived ultimately from the Bible (Gen. 10:8, also 1 Chron. 1:10 and Mic. 5:6), later tradition identified him with Ninus, a fictive king and founder of Nineveh, and established spurious connections for him with the history of ancient Mesopotamia. The transformation of Nimrod into an astronomer from Babylonia is an example of the impact of cuneiform knowledge upon the Western imagination.

Legitimate traces of the original Babylonian astronomy and astrology, the celestial divination and prognostication, observational records and ephemerides written on cuneiform tablets, entered Europe too, as evidenced in Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, or Geminus’s Introduction to the Phenomena.¹⁶ Later, however, despite occasional ascriptions of certain traditions to Chaldeans, genuine Babylonian ideas were largely unknown to all but the rarest and most astute of textual critics, such as the classicist and chronographer Scaliger. We may note with a bit of irony that not many years after Scaliger’s death, the celebrated seventeenth-century traveler Pietro della Valle brought back to Rome the first cuneiform texts ever seen in Europe.

On the philosophical side the cuneiform source material can be profitably analyzed in terms of themes familiar to the philosophical investigation of science, such as Empiricism, rationality, causality, and model-making. Such analysis, it is hoped, can add to ongoing debates about epistemology in the history of science more generally, particularly those concerned with local versus universal knowledge, or pluralism versus monism about scientific knowledge.

To respond both to historical and philosophical dimensions of the relationship of cuneiform knowledge to science, this book is divided into four parts: Part I is historiographical; part II is epistemological; part III has to do with reasoning, causality and law, and part IV with the phenomenological framework within which the cuneiform scholarly imagination took shape and developed through celestial observation, prediction, and explanation.

As the historiographical part, part I sets out to bring cuneiform sources to the table in a consideration of the historiography of science. Chapter 1 establishes a conceptual reference point for such a history of science that includes cuneiform knowledge as a representation of other ways in which the world was studied, organized, and understood beyond the borders of the notional territory of nature. Chapter 2 returns to Henri Frankfort and colleagues’ Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man as a historiographical point of departure and aims to put the present work into its historical context and to mount a detailed critique of its approach.

Critiques of the validity of the Western category of science for non-Western or ancient sources have been aired by others elsewhere, making the case that the theological component of ancient knowledge systems makes it difficult to separate science from religion in antiquity (if not up until the early modern period as well). The anachronistic separation of ancient science and religion is not the battle engaged in the chapters of part II. Depending on what aspects of cuneiform texts and their historical and social contexts we seek to analyze and elucidate, the conceptual apparatus of either science or religion or both can come into play. Although the constructs science and religion share the problem that each uses a present category to understand a past reality, this book is not aimed at a resolution of that particular category problem. In the evidence presented in the chapters of part II, the gods are ever present, but their presence does not mitigate the approach to understanding cuneiform knowledge systems in terms of science rather than religion any more than the presence of God in late antique, medieval, and early modern sources limits the history of science in those periods.

Part II is interested in what was known in the cuneiform scholarly world, and in what context things were objects of knowledge. These are the two aspects central to chapter 3, which looks at ominous signs as a principal, though not the only, element for understanding how knowledge of the heavens, of plants, animals, and stones was developed in the cuneiform world. Understanding that cuneiform knowledge took shape because certain social structures and values both required and produced it, this chapter looks at the major bodies of knowledge produced by scholars of the royal court and divine temple best known from the activities of the scholars in the palaces of Neo-Assyrian monarchs as well as in later developments from Neo-Babylonian and Hellenistic periods. It focuses on written bodies of knowledge of the heavens, of plants, animals, and stones. An exploration of cuneiform knowledge could just as easily focus on what is known as the lexicographical tradition, which offers a wholly different and equally significant dimension to the history of cuneiform epistemology. I leave this complex investigation to specialists in that extensive domain of sources.¹⁷

The concerns of cuneiform divinatory and astronomical texts with norms against which regularity and irregularity, the normal and the anomalous, were defined, is the subject of chapter 4. It is through this exploration of the systematic consideration of norms, ideals, malformations, and anomalies that a cuneiform modality of order can be established without dependence on a conception of nature. The search for and understanding of order and anomaly also constitutes one of the principal aspects of the kinship relation between science and cuneiform knowledge.

Part III considers how to approach the fact that the ancient cuneiform scribes engaged with the entities of the world from a perspective different from that which lies at the basis of science in its Western form, that is, in the form presumptive of naturalism, together with its distinct methodological, metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological implications. How and what phenomena were known from such a perspective, as examined in part II, is central to the question of the scribes’ engagement with their world. No less important is the question of how we are to understand the use of empirical, deductive, and analogical reasoning within the framework of their various inquiries.

Chapter 5 takes up the cognitive-historical matter of the rational, both in contemporary scholarship on cuneiform divination and astronomy and in the evidence for forms of reasoning in various cuneiform knowledge systems. Rationality in cuneiform knowledge is here found to stand on grounds other than those established by Greek philosophical criteria. In the face of the evidence of cuneiform texts, such criteria, once presumed to be universal for defining scientific rationality, can be questioned. Further, because of the absence of nature as a meaningful category in the cuneiform world, the problem of apparently irrational beliefs, usually associated with explanation by recourse to supernatural agency, must be addressed differently. Indeed, to invoke supernatural agency presupposes a conception of the order of nature, and to base causation upon a supposed category of the supernatural distorts the evidence of cuneiform magical texts that do not operate on the basis of such ideas. Instead, analogical and associative reasoning is considered in the context of cuneiform knowledge, specifically as it functioned independently of a framework of nature and natural phenomena.

Chapter 6 explores causality and law, famously interrelated aspects in the philosophy of science, in relation particularly to Assyro-Babylonian divination, taking up questions about how the scribe-scholars viewed connections between things, and how an idea of cosmic order akin to the laws of nature was expressed before the conception of nature was formulated.

Part IV focuses on celestial divination, astronomy, and astrology, separable more in terms of text types and less as a matter of intellectual domain, to examine how observation, prediction, and explanation of heavenly phenomena were fundamental to those scholarly pursuits, contributing to the scribes’ conception of what it meant to understand the phenomena of the heavens.

Chapter 7 looks at the role of observation in the cuneiform knowledge of the heavens. Two corpora shed considerable light on this subject, together spanning close to a thousand years of observational recording. Combined, they provide a legitimate site for the study of the earliest selective attention to heavenly phenomena, meaningful within a context of interdependent knowledge and practices—namely, divination, astronomy, and astrology.

One of the obvious and principal goals of cuneiform knowledge of celestial phenomena was that of prediction. Whether to predict from the signs, or to predict the signs themselves, prediction relates to the empirical and rational dimensions of cuneiform knowledge. Chapter 8 considers two classes of prediction represented by divinatory and astronomical practice, as well as two forms of explanation that divide similarly along the lines of divination and astronomy. A logical symmetry between prediction and explanation was long ago canonical in the philosophy of science. This position has since been abandoned, but more recent discussion of other ways to see interconnection casts an interesting light on the landscape of the scribes’ use of prediction and explanation, which do not attest to a logical symmetry but can be seen to have a certain interdependence.

We might classify many of the phenomena of interest in the cuneiform world as natural phenomena, though the ancient scholar did not. What difference does it make? Is the difference merely terminological? I submit that it is not primarily a terminological problem but is fundamentally conceptual, and as such makes a very great difference. Without a reference to nature, and therefore no sense of it comparable to that held by Greek, medieval, or early modern natural philosophers, certainly not of modern scientists, our understanding of the particular orientation of cuneiform scholars to their contemporary environment needs to establish itself on different grounds.

Indeed, our construal of cuneiform bodies of knowledge and their associated activities, as well as every aspect of the philosophy of such knowledge—epistemology, reasoning, causality, observation, explanation, and prediction—must be sensitive to its native conceptual grounds, the universe of cuneiform observation, interpretation, and prediction. In this regard cuneiform knowledge tests our sensitivity to the limit. With this in mind, the concluding chapter addresses what I hold to be the legitimate place of cuneiform scholarly knowledge in the history of science, and the unique framework it established within which to exercise its particular scientific imagination.

PART I

Historiography

CHAPTER ONE

Science and Nature

pirišti ilāni rabûti secret knowledge of the great gods

Modern universalism flows directly from naturalist ontology, based as it is on the principle that beyond the muddle of particularisms endlessly churned out by humans, there exists a field of truths reassuringly regular, knowable via tried and trusted methods, and reducible to immanent laws the exactness of which is beyond blight from their discovery process. In short, cultural relativism is only tolerable, indeed interesting to study, in that it stands against the overwhelming background of a natural universalism where truth seekers can seek refuge and solace. Mores, customs, ethos vary but the mechanisms of carbon chemistry, gravitation and DNA are identical for all.

PHILIPPE DESCOLA, Who Owns Nature?

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.

THOMAS KUHN, The Natural and the Human Sciences, in The Road since Structure: Thomas S. Kuhn

THE CUNEIFORM WORLD AND THE NATURAL WORLD

There is nothing self-evident about nature. Neither the phenomena of nature nor the environment as such have always been understood in the way we now understand them, and yet we tend to assume that what we call the natural world with its myriad forms, regularities, and irregularities confronts us all and always has. Haven’t we always stood and still stand before nature, observing, inquiring, and seeking to understand it as a whole, or in its parts? There is a serious question of reference that fails to justify such an assumption. Neither the sense nor the reference of the word is absolute across cultures and history. What we make of the natural world is a direct function of our particular moment in history, our particular cultural idiom and imagination. R. G. Collingwood concluded his extended historical essay on the idea of nature with the observation that

nature, though it is a thing that really exists, is not a thing that exists in itself or in its own right, but a thing which depends for its existence upon something else . . . that natural science is not a tissue of fancies or fabrications, mythology or tautology, but is a search for truth . . . but that natural science is not, as the positivists imagined, the only department or form of human thought about which this can be said, and is not even a self-contained and self-sufficient form of thought, but depends for its very existence upon some other form of thought which is different from it and cannot be reduced to it.¹

At issue in the following chapters is not the ontological problem of whether there is a mind-independent universal state of physical reality that we call nature, a realm apart from human interaction with it, operating in accordance with its own immutable and universal laws. Nor is it the historical problem of the development of the conception of that universal nature. Neither are the various naturalisms relevant to the study of cuneiform knowledge and the world to which it refers—methodological naturalism, where the supernatural has no place in scientific explanation; metaphysical naturalism, where the supernatural does not exist and all supervenes on nature; epistemological naturalism, where knowledge is attached to things such as natural kinds; or ontological naturalism, where only science ascertains what exists (sometimes but not always equated with physicalism). None of these positions will help us gain purchase on the cuneiform world of inquiry about phenomena.

The effort to understand the world of our perception and experience of phenomena might be a basic way to define the impetus for science, even though quite different ways of construing objects of inquiry and different methods of knowing have been historically encompassed by what we call science. There have been any number of claims as to when and where science emerged, from the beginnings of European modernity, to the European Middle Ages, to the classical Greek period, and even in ancient Babylonia. A claim that parts of the ancient cuneiform corpus contain evidence of the thinking and doing of science may well be an affirmation that Theseus’s ship retained at least something of its identity after having had all its planks replaced. At the same time, and whether one agrees or not that the ship of science was launched from ancient Mesopotamia to be utterly changed by the modern period, it seems plain that the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian scribes of the cuneiform world had no stakes in knowing nature as such.

From a modern Western scientific perspective such a world is difficult to imagine. But as Philippe Descola stated the matter: Seen from the point of view of a hypothetical Jivaro or Chinese historian of science, Aristotle, Descartes, and Newton would not appear so much as the revealers of the distinctive objectivity of nonhumans and the laws that govern them, rather, they would seem the architects of a naturalistic cosmology altogether exotic in comparison with the choices made by the rest of humanity in order to classify the entities of the world and establish hierarchies and discontinuities among them.² So too did Assyrian and Babylonian scribes engage with the entities of the world from a perspective different from that which lies at the basis of science in its later Western forms. The scribes’ engagement with the world, as preserved in learned cuneiform texts, was not presumptive of nature, consequently not open to the possibilities for methodological, epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical naturalisms. In that sense, before nature is meant to represent the perspective before the conception of nature was formulated, a perspective wholly open to reconstruction and interpretation. What is offered here is but one such reconstruction and interpretation.

In the cuneiform world, ominous phenomena in general, and astral phenomena in particular, were observed, analyzed, calculated, and predicted by learned and specialized scribes. Entities of the external world were of interest, for example, to diviners, and to medical practitioners, who knew about the efficacy of plants used in administering the sick by mouth, aromatic woods for his or her fumigation, and stones used in making amulets to aid in conjuring evil spirits viewed as responsible for disease. As well, lists and descriptions of objects in the physical environment are attested in extensive bilingual Sumerian and Akkadian lexical lists of the writings of words for trees, birds, domestic and wild animals (from the series Ura Tablet XIII, for example),³ or, indeed, in the simile-filled descriptions of landscape and terrain traversed by the Assyrian army as well as the flora and fauna encountered and described in the highly literary accounts of Neo-Assyrian annals. All of these texts are evidence of the interest in, awareness of, and observance of all kinds of things that exist in the topographies of heaven and earth. But as Niek Veldhuis said in reference to the Sumerian lexical corpus, "the aim of this scholarship was not to understand nature or geography but to understand Sumerian and Sumerian writing."⁴ To better represent the interests and aims of cuneiform scribal culture vis-à-vis the physical environment, it seems that we ought to divest ourselves of nature as a heuristic category.

Functioning as a posit for the discussion to follow, therefore, is that a sense of nature in our or any other historical terms, such as in Greek or Roman antiquity—in which already there were multiple meanings of nature, including that which encompassed the divine—was not a factor in cuneiform sources bearing on the study of phenomena. And yet a great many phenomena that we would classify as natural exerted a strong pull on the intellectuals of cuneiform society, seen most sharply in the areas of what we designate as astronomy, celestial divination, natal astrology, as well as other kinds of divination, where many different phenomena were taken as signs from the gods.

Cuneiform texts seeking to know about the phenomena were not alone in antiquity in their interest in the connection between divinity and the world. Ancient Greek astronomy and cosmology exhibit a strong commitment to the idea of the heavens as divine.⁵ Even among the philosophers of the Old Academy entities such as demons and spirits, somewhere between human beings and gods had to be fitted into the world as a whole. As P. Merlan put it, We should call them supernatural, but for a Platonist, as for many other Greeks, the concept of nature was much wider than for us and simply included such entities. We must not forget that in the philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus even gods become ‘natural’ entities and are simply nature’s products.⁶ It is, therefore, not simply a matter of the gods versus nature. It is the question of how to reimagine a framework for phenomena that does not involve all-encompassing nature, and how methods of knowing can function within such a framework through the use of empirical, deductive, associative, and analogical reasoning. The relationship between what we think of as natural phenomena and what the Assyro-Babylonian scribes thought of as signs will be a principal point of entry into these questions.

SIGNS AND WONDERS

Signs, or omens, in cuneiform texts are to be distinguished from anomalies, prodigies, or what later might have been seen as marvels or wonders. Unlike the miraculous, signs in the cuneiform omen corpus are not limited to anomalous occurrences, although certainly anomalies were an important part of the vast divinatory enterprise. An entire omen series was devoted to anomalous births (Šumma izbu).⁷ Anomalies were, however, not defined against nature, or as preternatural, but against certain patterns within which phenomena were observed to occur in an ordered world.

A phenomenon such as a solar eclipse, before its regularity and periodicity were known, must assuredly have been a wonder, and a terrifying one at that. But by the time such signs were recorded and systematized into textual series, Babylonian and Assyrian treatment of solar eclipses as signs is no longer explainable wholly in terms of wonders. Given that by the middle of the first millennium BCE, the Saros period governing eclipse possibilities, both lunar and solar, was understood by Babylonian astronomers,⁸ the response to a solar eclipse, for those who could calculate one, can hardly be explained in terms of wonders. At the same time, however, to count the Saros cycle texts as testimony to an understanding of, or even interest in, the laws of nature would be an anachronistic way of viewing them.

The biblical passages making reference to the signs and wonders (Deut. 26:8 and Neh. 9:10) that accompanied the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt refer to divine miracles sent by God against the regular order of nature, the plagues that affected only part of the population, people speaking in tongues. When Joshua commanded the sun to stand still over Gibeon, and the moon to do likewise over the Valley of Aijalon, and Yahweh stopped the celestial bodies in their tracks in the middle of the sky for an entire day (Josh. 10:12–14), these too were divine miracles, decisive for the Israelite army against the Amorites. Each miracle demonstrated the power of God to disrupt cosmic order at will and also to drive the narrative about the Israelites’ successes against their enemies.⁹

The demonstration of divine power by manipulation of celestial bodies was not unknown in the cuneiform literary