Pathways into the Study of Ancient Sciences

The book under review is a selection of essays from the prodigious oeuvre of David Pingree (1933–2005), the foremost scholar of ancient astral sciences in Near Eastern, Indian, and Greco-Latin texts. This collection of 33 papers, produced over the course of four decades from 1963 to 2003, was edited by Isabelle Pingree and John M. Steele. They have brought previously published papers hitherto scattered in sometimes difficult to obtain journals and volumes together as a useful and representative collection.

Pingree was concerned with what he called “the history of the exact sciences … as practiced in ancient Mesopotamia, in ancient and medieval Greece, India, and the Latin-speaking West, and in medieval Islam” (p. 3). Through his life’s work, Pingree showed concretely by the study of manuscripts and their histories that, in fact, the exact sciences, as represented in these materials, sometimes widely separated both geographically and chronologically, constituted a single integral historical field.

The opening section of “general studies” focuses on topics related to transmission, translation, and mingling of textual traditions from the Indus Valley in the east to Europe in the west. The editors’ choice to open with the set piece “Hellenophilia and the history of science” (1992) is a good one. It presents Pingree’s aim to study the history of science as a matter of written sources in context, with the further consequence that essential to the study of science in history are subjects which

were or are sciences within the contexts of the cultures in which they once flourished or now are practiced … and that the intellectual content must be related to the culture that produced and nourished each, and to the social context within which each arose and developed [p. 3] … If my definition of science as it must be viewed by a historian is accepted, it is easy to show that astrology and certain “learned” forms of divination, magic, alchemy, and so on are “sciences” [p. 8] … Much of my argument has been based on the anthropological perception that science is not the apprehension of an external set of truths that mankind is progressively acquiring a greater knowledge of, but that rather the sciences are the products of human culture [p. 12].

These statements clarify Pingree’s fundamentally context-driven historiographical approach and reflect, arguably, the central commitment of his research. The sciences, from his point of view, are comprised of a plurality of local traditions of knowledge that were never simply transmitted but always bound up with other parts of the contexts in which they existed and continued to have value.

Arguing for the legitimacy of the study of astrology as science in history, the introductory section of the volume moves on to an encyclopaedia entry defining ancient astrology and making the distinction between Babylonian celestial divination and astrology, the former being about omens, the latter about celestial influence in a physical (effective) way. This definition is further specified in the lengthy “From Alexandria to Baghdād to Byzantium: The transmission of astrology” as the interpretation of the horoscopic diagram “representing the positions of the planets and the zodiacal signs at the moment of a native’s conception or birth” (p. 18), and places the invention of this system with the Greeks in Egypt ca. 100 c.e. D. Greenbaum and M. Ross have argued that

varying definitions of “horoscope” alter the identification of horoscopes in antiquity … and the historical conclusions drawn from these pieces of evidence. In fact, depending on which definition is used, the origin of the horoscope could have occurred in Babylon, Egypt or Greece.” ¹

Pingree’s definition, quoted before, also precisely describes the cuneiform horoscopes that represent positions of the planets and zodiacal signs at the moment of birth or conception. ² The article “From Alexandria to Baghdād to Byzantium” traces the lines of descent from Greek astrological manuscripts from Alexandrea to Sanskrit translations made in the mid-second to third centuries of our era. Greek and Sanskrit astrological texts of the early centuries c.e. were in turn known in Iran, where a Sasanian astrology would later, in the eighth century, be preserved in Arabic.

The section on Mesopotamia focuses on the knowledge of astronomical phenomena and methods of prediction embedded in or related to Babylonian celestial divinatory texts (the omen series Enūma Anu Enlil). One of the observational texts concerning Mercury, for example, antedates the seventh century b.c.e. and thus belongs to a small number of astronomical texts, including those for reporting eclipses, ³ that support the idea that the Babylonian institution of celestial observation did indeed begin in the eighth century (we may also recall that Ptolemy’s Nabonassar Era began in -747/746). Another indication that certain aspects of later Babylonian astronomical methodology were seeded in the context of seventh-century Assyro-Babylonian scribal scholarship is the paper on seasonal hours.

The section on the Classical World pays particular attention to the reception of Greek astronomical models and pre-Ptolemaic astronomical texts in India of the fourth century and later and also concerns itself with reception in “The Teaching of the Almagest in Late Antiquity.” There we see generations of scholia and commentary providing links between Greek, Iranian, and Indian astronomy, including a period of Ptolemaic astronomy in Syria of the sixth to ninth centuries.

At the heart of the volume is the section on India, which opens with the early piece, “Astronomy and Astrology in India and Iran” (1963). This essay weaves a complex story of transmission and borrowing that took place between ancient Mesopotamia and India of the early Persian (Achaemenid) period, involving methods of calculating daylight length and other matters of time reckoning, calendrical period relations, and planetary parameters. In the first century b.c.e., the establishment of the Śaka (Scythian) kingdom in western India opened a further conduit to the west; by the second century c.e., in the period of Ptolemy the astronomer, Greek horoscopy and astronomy was adopted (particularly that of the “Lord of the Greeks,” or Yavaneśvara, a verse form of which was made in 270 by Sphujidhvaja ⁴ ) and with it Babylonian mathematical astronomy. This in essence supports a statement Pingree makes in a later article (No. 29) that astronomy and astrology were not sciences indigenous to India. Rather, India was heir to traditions in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Pahlavī, Syriac, and Assyro-Babylonian Akkadian. But the Śaka capital of Ujjain became, as Pingree put it, “The Greenwich of Indian astronomy and the Arin of the Arabic and Latin astronomical treatises” (p. 116). Pingree argues that the developed Indian astrology, by the late fourth century c.e., had in turn influenced “Sasanian, Arabic, Byzantine, and western European astrology” (p. 167).

The section on Islam is similarly concerned to show the persistence of Hellenistic astronomical and astrological sciences from Greek and Syriac traditions with elaborations from India and Iran in Abbāsid astronomy and astrology, as discussed in “The Greek Influence on Early Islamic Mathematical Astronomy.” Elsewhere, Pingree was able to show that the background for the interwoven nature of the astronomical, astrological, as well as alchemical, sciences of Islam was established already in pre-Islamic Syria. ⁵

The final section deals with the astral sciences of Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance Europe, where it is shown that astrology was the reason for the continued interest in theoretical astronomy through continued study of the Almagest and eventually of Arabic astronomical treatises and tables (zîjs). Another important aspect of this late phase of the “ancient astral sciences” is the continuation of ancient astral magic in the “Pseudo-Platonica” of the Liber Vaccae, or Book of the Cow, a work of complex intellectual background deftly disambiguated by Pingree in “Plato’s hermetic Book of the Cow.” In Ḥarrān, the city of the Ṣābians, the ancient locus of the moon-god’s cult transplanted from Babylonia in the sixth century b.c.e., a veritable melting pot of traditions from ancient Mesopotamia, Sasanian Iran, India, and Greece enabled the persistence of astral magic during the ninth to eleventh centuries in a typically Platonic-Aristotelian form. The hermetic Book of the Cow represents a strain of astral magic related to that in the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm and its Latin translation, the Picatrix. ⁶ Liber Vaccae is extant in 12 manuscripts mostly copied between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe. This text concerned itself with varieties of astrological ritual magic, including the vivification of statues at propitious times and the implantation of soul or spirit to inanimate bodies and to generate life by magical artifice, such as manufacturing artificial bees (p. 467). The debt to Plato and Aristotle appears to be in reference to their works concerning the generation and souls of animals (p. 472) and was rejected by William of Auvergne and Nicholaus Oresme ⁷ and also by Pico della Mirandola, as mentioned in the opening of the paper. The impact of ancient astral magic deep into the Renaissance is further treated in its multi-linguistic and diverse origins in the last paper of the volume, “Learned magic in the time of Frederick II.” It is safe to say that few, if any, other scholars could have controlled the linguistic and technical materials required to penetrate these strains of thought that more and more are recognized as key to understanding the context within which we once isolated the so-called Scientific Revolution.

The impact of Pingree’s approach to the celestial sciences from antiquity to the Renaissance cannot be overestimated. He, more than anyone of his generation, investigated and made available the sources for the study of both astronomy and astrology. In the mid-1970s, Pingree was already beginning to edit Greek astrological treatises, such as the early fifth-century c.e. Hephaistio of Thebes’ Apotelesmatica (1974), which had been first published by August Engelbrecht in 1887. In 1976, he prepared the first-century c.e. Dorotheus of Sidon’s Carmen Astrologicum and in 1986 a re-edition of Wilhelm Kroll’s 1907 first edition of the Anthologium of Vettius Valens from the second century c.e. Pingree’s edition of the Byzantine (early seventh century) Rhetorius was not completed at his death, but is now forthcoming by David Pingree and Stephan Heilen as Rhetorius. Compendium astrologicum secundum epitomen in cod. Paris. Gr. 2425 servatam (De Gruyter). Apart from the sources compiled by Rhetorius for astrology, the work represents testimony that Ptolemy’s Almagest was still being read in Alexandria just before the Muslim conquest. Among Sanskrit astrological works, Pingree edited the Yavanajātaka, or “Horoscopy of the Greeks” in 1978.

Through his many editions and studies, David Pingree was able to show how the astral sciences crossed the cultures of the hellenistic oikoumene, including India, and in the late fourth and fifth centuries of our era in Sasanian Iran where they continued into the creative period of Islamic science. The geographical, chronological, and linguistic breadth of Pingree’s research and publication record is matched by the depth of its textual and technical analysis. We owe a debt of gratitude to Isabelle Pingree and John Steele for bringing together this diverse yet coherent collection of David Pingree’s papers that will long serve all interested professionals and students of the history of science.

Francesca RochbergUniversity of California, Berkeleyrochberg@berkeley.edu