The Babylonian train-schedule

On topic of cosmology, let's discuss how the Babylonians dealt with the Vault Of Heaven. In short - they failed to.

Babylonia was already an old civilisation when the Greeks found it. Akkadian readers could look back one or two thousand years to Sargon; Sumerian readers could look further still. They had more than enough time to notice certain repeating patterns, mainly the recurrence of planetary conjunctions. The main conjunctions are of course the Moon and Sun in their eclipses, most dramatically the solar occultation.

Enter Francesca Rochberg, “Periodicities and Period Relations in Babylonian Celestial Sciences” ed. Kozuh ch. 16.

Here's the fun part: the Babylonians didn't ask why. They just figured the heavens for an impersonal orrery. They wanted to know how these natural patterns in heaven might affect life down here on Earth. They basically don't but there was a whole industry of quacks to claim that they did. Given that, they didn't care what was making the planets and Moon go 'round about as they do. They just took notes on where they appeared and when. The Babylonian approach wasn't the geometrical diagram sketched on papyrus; it was the timetable chipped out on stone and clay.

It was Greeks like Euclid and finally the great Ptolemy who plotted out the trajectories. And then Kepler, picking it up again, with an algebra. Then Newton and, at the last, Riemann and Einstein.

For a timetable approach, the 360 degree allocation worked well-enough. Perhaps with a five or six day pause between "years". Mesoamerica did similarly. Except that Babylonians tended to a base-60 arithmetic - two months at a time - where the Mesoamerica went with base-20.

Rochberg further offers the Babylonian view of the circle. For them, it was the "shape within a circumference". If they put this in a square, they could get diameter from that or, you know, 7/22. Area was calculated from diameter. The centre of the circle did not matter; accordingly, the radius did not matter. By extension no-one was asking about the distance between the Earth and the Moon nor, for that matter, the Earth's surface to its own core. Well, no-one but them Greek homos.

What I suspect a truly mathematical civilisation could have used, in the Bronze Age, was a log table, like Napier's. Ah well. Even the Choresmians didn't swing that.