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A Study of Babylonian Observations Involving the Zodiac

The development of the zodiac in the fifth century B.C. provided Babylonian astronomers with a new means of specifying the position of the moon or a planet. In analogy with the ‘ideal year’ of twelve 30-day months that appears in several earlier astronomical and astrological texts, the Babylonians divided the bands of the sky in which the sun, moon and planets move into twelve segments, each one of which was subdivided into 30 parts. Distances along these bands were measured by zodiacal signs and degrees within those signs. A study by Huber in 1958 showed that for some of the zodiacal signs the dates predicted in Babylonian Almanacs for when a planet will cross from one sign to another coincide with the dates predicted for when the planet is in conjunction with one of the so-called ‘Normal Stars’ (a group of reference stars used by the Babylonians) in the Normal Star Almanacs. More recently, Jones has found the same coincidences in the observational texts known as the Astronomical Diaries. These studies imply that the Babylonian zodiac was fixed sidereally (i.e., with respect to the stars), rather than tropically (i.e., with respect to the equinoxes) as in Greek astronomy. The discovery of two Babylonian catalogues of Normal Stars listing the positions of the stars in degrees within zodiacal signs supports this conclusion. The zodiac appears in five principal contexts within Babylonian astronomy: