It might seem odd to group religion with mathematics and science, because to modern people they are usually separate. But to ancient peoples such as the Babylonians, these concepts were linked. Indeed, Babylonian achievements in astronomy, the scientific study of the stars' movements, resulted from their interest in astrology.
Astrology is the study of the position of stars and planets that, according to believers in astrology, have a direct effect on a person's everyday life. Like people of ancient times, modern people read horoscopes, or astrological charts, in hopes of finding out who they will marry, or whether they will get rich, or what other things fate has in store for them. Astrology was and is an unscientific belief system, more like a superstition than a science. Yet it makes use of scientific data or information, and therefore the Babylonians' astrological studies yielded some advances in learning.
Though they did not have telescopes, which are essential to the work of a modern-day astronomer, Babylonian astrologers charted the movements of the heavenly bodies they could see with the naked eye. Each of these had an association with a god. The Moon was Sin, a deity (DEE-ih-tee) first worshiped by the Sumerians; the Sun was Shamash, who drove across the sky in a fiery chariot; and so on all the way to Jupiter, which they equated with the supreme god Marduk (MAR-duke).
Marduk was primarily a Babylonian deity, but most of their gods originated in Sumer. Ishtar (ISH-tar), associated with Venus, seems to have come from the Sumerian goddess Inanna. The Greeks and later the Romans worshiped deities with similar roles—and with the same planetary associations. Thus, for instance, the Greek and Roman Apollo, the sun god, drove a chariot across the sky every day. As for the planets, today these are known by the Roman names of gods whose function was typically the same as their Babylonian counterpart: Jupiter the supreme god, Venus the goddess of love, and so on.
The Babylonians divided the period of the Earth's movement around the Sun into twelve signs of the astrological zodiac.
Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission.
By the time of Nebuchadnezzar II centuries later, Babylonian astronomy had progressed a great deal. The Babylonians were the first to recognize that planets and stars were not the same thing, and they made detailed observations of the Earth's movement around the Sun. They figured that the Earth took 360 days to revolve around the Sun.
Their calculation of a year's length was off by 5.25 days, but the number 360 made for easy division. From the Babylonians comes the idea of a circle as having 360 degrees, each degree of which is divided into sixty minutes, which in turn are divided into sixty seconds.
These terms are still used for measuring angles and portions of a cir-cle—but of course minutes and seconds are also used for measuring time in a day, which is one of the most notable of all Babylonian contributions to modern life. The Babylonians also divided the period of the Earth's movement around the sun into twelve signs of the astrological zodiac (ZOE-dee-ack) and divided the year into twelve months. Theirs were lunar months, however, meaning that they were based on the twenty-eight day cycle of the Moon.
Therefore in some years they had to add a thirteenth month to make the calendar work out right. To divide the month, they used the four phases of the Moon as it goes from a new moon to a full moon and back again. A twenty-eight day month divided by four yields a seven-day week—yet another Babylonian contribution to everyday life.
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