Content area
Full Text
Out of the vast number of cuneiform tablets identified during the last century as containing planetary omens, and therefore as connected with the series Enüma Anu Enlil, and specifically with its fourth and last section, commonly called IStar, the largest group is that devoted to Venus. This fact immediately differentiates the importance of this planet in the omen tradition from the place that it holds in the mathematical astronomy of the Seleucid period, where Venus is rather poorly represented. However, two tablets - an atypical text from the second half of the fifth century B.C.1 and an ACT procedure text2 - both from Babylon, indicate that rather complex theories of Venus involving subdivisions of the arcs and times between its characteristic phenomena were already current in the early Achaemenid period and continued in use in the Seleucid period. These are quite sufficient to show that Venus was not neglected by those who were constructing the mathematical theories of the planets, even though its orbit as seen from the earth did not fit the models that were developed for the superior planets.
But, while Venus' phenomena were not amenable to description by stepfunctions or zig-zag functions, these same phenomena provided the earliest mathematical theory of any planet that we have; this is found in the 8 section of Tablet 63 of Enüma Anu Enlil, the so-called Venus Tablet of Ammiçaduqa, a crude theory by which approximate dates for the successive occurrences of four phenomena - first visibilities and invisibilities in the East and in the West - could be anticipated.3 In general, however, the scribes of Enüma Anu Enlil were not interested in these Greek-letter phenomena except as parts of more complex omens - and even then, at least in my understanding of what they wrote, never directly mentioned the other two phenomena that are included in the later mathematical theory, first and second station, nor even the arc of retrogression that separates them. But in the planetary omens it is really only Mars' rather extreme and Jupiter's retrograde arcs that drew attention, as each entered a constellation and then backed out of it before plunging into it again. The exceptions in Enüma Anu Enlil outside of Tablet 63 to this general neglect of the...