In the Path of the Moon - (Ancient Magic and Divination) by Francesca Rochberg (Hardcover)

About the Book

In the Path of the Moon offers a collection of essays concerning Babylonian celestial divination. It investigates various aspects of cuneiform celestial omens, horoscopes, and astronomy and their wide-ranging influences on later Hellenistic science and philosophy.

Book Synopsis

In the Path of the Moon offers a collection of essays concerning Babylonian celestial divination. It investigates various aspects of cuneiform celestial omens, horoscopes, and astronomy and their wide-ranging influences on later Hellenistic science and philosophy.

From the Back Cover

Celestial divination, in the form of omens from lunar, planetary, astral, and meteorological phenomena, was central to Mesopotamian cuneiform scholarship and science from the late second millennium BCE into the Hellenistic period. Beyond the boundaries of ancient Mesopotamia, the ideas, texts, and traditions of Babylonian celestial divination are traceable in Hellenistic sciences and philosophies. This collection of essays investigates features of Babylonian celestial divination with special focus on those aspects that influenced later Greco-Roman astronomy, astrology, and theories of signs. A multi-faceted collection of philological, historical, and philosophical investigations, "In the Path of the Moon" offers Assyriologists, Classicists, and historians of ancient science a wide-ranging series of studies unified around the theme of Babylonian celestial divination's legacy.

Review Quotes

"This collection is a praiseworthy testament to the dedication, focus, and enterprise of a scholar without whose attention and efforts the field would be all the poorer. Rochberg's scholarship is both definitive and exemplary, and she poses and addresses general questions that are both lucid and evocative, with a characteristic flair and expertise. In this way, her work is an aid as well as an inducement to current and succeeding generations of Assyriologists and Classicists to further their studies on the intellectual cultures of the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean, and beyond, and to investigate more thoroughly their contributions, interaction, and legacy." - Clemency Montelle, University of Canterbury, in: Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol.133, no.2 (2013)
"The volume offers food for thought, not just identifying particular ideas and elements that have Mesopotamian origins or discussing the nature of the Babylonian preoccupation with the celestial bodies, but raising questions of the transmission of cultural artefacts, which routes they may have followed, and how they were incorporated into a new religious and / or scientific context." - Ulla Susanne Koch, University of Freiburg, in: Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, vol.110, no.6 (2015)
"The collected essays in this volume, successive steps in an ordered path, constitute an invaluable contribution to a better understanding of Babylonian divination." - Lorenzo Verderame, "Sapienza" Università di Roma, in: Aestimatio 8 (2011)

About the Author

Francesca Rochberg, Ph.D., University of Chicago, is Catherine and William Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published widely on Babylonian divination and science, including The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004).