The Enūma Anu Enlil, a series of 70 clay tablets, was found in the ruins of King Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh (on the eastern bank of the River Tigris, opposite modern-day Mosul in Iraq). The name means “in the days of Anu and Enlil”; Anu was the sky god, Enlil the wind god. The tablets, which date as far back as 1950BC, list 7,000 omens from Babylonian astrology: “If the moon can be seen on the first day, the land will be happy.” But tablet 63 is different: it gives the times when Venus first became visible, or disappeared, over a 21-year period. This Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa is the earliest known record of planetary observations.
The Babylonians were expert astronomers who produced star catalogues and tables of eclipses, planetary motion and changes in the length of day. They were also capable mathematicians, with a number system much like ours, but using base 60 rather than ten. They could solve quadratic equations and calculate the diagonal of a square with precision, and they applied their mathematical skills to the heavens. In those days, mathematics and astronomy were part and parcel of astrology and religion, and the whole package was intimately bound up with agriculture through the progression of the seasons.
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