Babylonian Astronomy 1880-1950: The Players and the Field

This essay aims at telling the story of the rediscovery of Babylonian astronomy and of the wrestling of the early pioneers with the astronomical cuneiform texts in trying to understand the ingenious Babylonian numerical schemes for the computation of the celestial positions of the Sun, Moon and planets. When Otto Neugebauer entered the stage in the early 1930s, this pioneering phase had already come to an end. While at that time the field of Babylonian mathematical astronomy had been created, it needed Neugebauer to develop it into a well-established discipline in the history of science. This he accomplished almost single-handedly by systematically analyzing all texts available to him at the time in great depth and detail, eventually resulting in the publication of his magnum opus Astronomical Cuneiform Texts (Neugebauer 1955; here often referred to as ACT). In this essay I will strictly limit myself to the period 1880–1950, but most of what is in ACT is previewed in papers published before 1950.