Volume 8, Issue 1-2 - Special Issue: Scholars, Priests, and Temples: Babylonian and Egyptian Science in Context; Guest Associate Editor: Mathieu Ossendrijver

This article introduces a double issue comprising 11 papers about Babylonian and Egyptian priests and scholarship between ca. 600 bce and 200 ce . They constitute the proceedings of the workshop “Scholars, Priests, and Temples: Babylonian and Egyptian Science in Context”, which was held at the Humboldt University Berlin, 12–14 May 2016, with support of the Excellence Cluster TOPOI. The workshop brought together Assyriologists and Egyptologists with expertise in Babylonian and Egyptian scholarship, priesthoods and temple institutions. All contributions have been revised and updated since then. The present contribution offers a brief introduction on previous research, cross-cultural interactions, economic aspects, royal patronage, and internal developments of Babylonian and Egyptian temple scholarship, followed by short summaries of the papers.

The war between Assyria and Egypt resulted in the deportation of scholars from the Nile Valley to Mesopotamia. Among them were the so-called “snake charmers.” While it was a well-known profession in Egypt, this was not the case in Assyria or Babylonia, where the treatment of snakebites and scorpion stings was left to exorcist doctors. A number of clues from the late Neo-Assyrian and Achaemenid Persian periods suggest that the “snake charmers” from Egypt enjoyed success with the kings of the great empires in the Middle East. Their presence most likely resulted from the professional structure and visibility of the Egyptian “snake charmers,” which were relatively absent in Mesopotamia.

It is by now well established that authors and copyists of scholarly works also drafted legal documents, if only occasionally. This article examines newly available prosopographical information concerning the scribal activities of the Sîn-lēqi-unnīnī during the mid to late fourth century BCE. It offers new datings of learned texts that have been known to academic circles for a long time and argues that the extant archival texts from Early Hellenistic Uruk mainly belonged to the archives of the Aḫûtu and Ekur-zakir families. In addition, it presents cases of transference of linguistic items peculiar to one or the other genre, giving rise to some general remarks on cross-genre imprints.

This study focuses on literary and sub-literary texts which present Egyptian scholars. I first look at outsider’s views (like the church-father Clement of Alexandria), borderline views (like the Egyptian priest Chairemon), and insider’s views. For the latter examination, two compositions are studied in more detail. The first is the Book of the Temple , which is a manual of the ideal Egyptian temple, including sections about the duties of several of its intellectual specialists. The second is the Ritual for Entering the Chamber of Darkness , which is a difficult text about the initiation to arcane religious knowledge and the mysteries of writing.

The paper aims to collect and discuss evidence for astrologers in Egyptian temples during the Graeco-Roman period from several kinds of data, including astrological and astronomical texts, inscriptions, and documentary sources. Material evidence is also considered. It attempts to answer questions of who could act as an astrologer and what knowledge was required to become one. In addition, the paper discusses the position of astrologers in the temple hierarchy and other areas of knowledge in which astrologers were involved.

This article investigates the fragments of the Babyloniaca of Berossus on creation. The following aspects are considered: the narrative structure of the book and how the account of creation is introduced, with broader implications for the cultural claims of Berossus and his peers; the relation between Berossus and previous Mesopotamian traditions, mainly the Babylonian Epic of Creation (Enuma elish), as well as possible evidence of Greek influence; and finally the view of human nature which is implicit in his account of the creation of humankind, notably the elimination of female agency and how his narrative relates to theories of human generation and the body that were current among the Babylonians, the Greeks, and the Egyptians.

The article explores whether key features of Babylonian textual standardisation may have may have influenced basic patterns of text and commentary in the Babylonian Talmud. The paper takes the view that canonicity is a complex process involving different levels of standardising texts. On the whole, canonicity preserved major texts (like Gilgamesh, the Bible, the Hippocratic Corpus), but others considered as non-canonical (or ‘outside’) could still be used for explanatory purposes. The structure of the Babylonian Talmud (Mishnah, Gemara, Tosephta-based Beraitôt) serves as a useful model for comparison with earlier cuneiform compendia.

Within the Ancient Egyptian temple, science was an important occupation for certain specialized priests. Two fields particularly well documented are astronomy and astrology on the one hand, and medicine on the other. For the medical practitioners, namely the Sakhmet priest and the Leader of Serqet, there are even special manuals for their use attested. The paper presents some of the evidence and discusses it within its cultural context.

Egyptian temples and priests reshaped the Egyptian legal system throughout the first millennium BCE, as a result of both temple autonomy and state authority. In the early Third Intermediate Period (c. 1069–850 BCE), royal enforcement of laws diminished, and temples filled this vacuum by extending the use of judicial oracles, both to resolve disputes, and to document transactions. In the late Third Intermediate Period (c. 850–664 BCE), the temples decreased the use of judicial oracles, and introduced temple notary contracts to document transactions. Temples thereby established that written documentation took precedence over verbal witnesses, and they also developed systems of legal procedures employing these temple notary contracts. In doing so, the temples encouraged individuals to invest in private property. In the Saite and Persian Periods (664–332 BCE), resurgent royal and later imperial authorities brought uniformity to the forms of temple notary contracts, and to the system of legal procedures employing them. The temples may have produced codes of laws and legal procedures at this time, if they had not done so already in the late Third Intermediate Period. Priests also introduced the practice of antiquarian legal scholarship, to establish ancient legal precedents. Finally, in the Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BCE), the royal authorities continued to regulate temple courts and temple notaries. Nonetheless, they accepted at least some claims based on antiquarian legal scholarship by priests.

This paper addresses developments in the prediction of weather phenomena in Late Babylonian scholarly texts. Previously published and unpublished texts are analyzed and the underlying methods are compared with omen-based weather prognostication, developments in Babylonian astronomical prediction and reporting practices in the astronomical diaries. It is found that some texts combine long-term astronomical prediction with inferential methods for predicting weather phenomena. It is argued that these new methods for predicting weather phenomena are part of a larger Babylonian effort to predict and explain non-astronomical phenomena by relating them to predictable astronomical phenomena.

The astronomical compendium MUL.APIN was composed sometime before the seventh century BC and is known from many copies dating between the Neo-Assyrian and the Seleucid period. In this paper I argue that MUL.APIN continued to be read and understood throughout this period, and that there was still an active tradition of astronomy founded upon MUL.APIN until the end of cuneiform astronomy.

This article proposes to read the Babylonian Chronicle as historical literature. It argues that the text was composed in response to Babylonia’s integration in the Persian Empire. The text presents itself as a self-conscious departure from the chronographic tradition by tracing the roots of Babylon’s fate to the mid-eighth century, when a triangle of power is said to have emerged between Assyria, Babylonia and Elam—a configuration that reduced the Babylonian monarch to inaction and incompetence from the very start.