Chaldea

For your reading and research enjoyment courtesy of the NYU Library’s Ancient World Digital Library, in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW):

Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge in Second Temple Literature, Edited by Jonathan Ben-Dov and Seth L. Sanders.

What is there to say but thank you?

N.B. One of my favourite introductory lines may be found in the above volume, in “Networks of Scholars: The Transmission of Astronomical and Astrological Learning between Babylonians, Greeks and Jews”, by Mladen Popović:

“What do we know about what ancient Jewish scholars knew about what Babylonian scholars knew?”

Sidoli, Nathan and Van Brummelen, Glen, Eds. 2014. From Alexandria, Through Baghdad: Surveys and Studies in the Ancient Greek and Medieval Islamic Mathematical Sciences in Honor of J.L. Berggren. [Hardcover]

Of interest to scholars and students of the history of mathematics and astronomy in ancient Greece and Medieval Islam is this volume, honouring the career of history of mathematics professor J.L. Berggren. The volume includes contributions spanning approximately seventy years of research, from the mid twentieth century onward.

Notable astronomical chapters include:

James Evans and Christian Carlos Cartman, “Mechanical Astronomy: A Route to the Ancient Discovery of Epicycles and Eccentrics.”

Alexander Jones, “Some Greek Sundial Meridians.”

and

David A. King, “An Ottoman Astrolabe Full of Surprises.”

For more information, please see the Springer web site.

Currently being displayed at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, this 4000 year old silt cuneiform tablet, inscribed in Akkadian, contains a schedule listing activities taking place during a week in the month of Shevat, highlighting its Babylonian antecedents. Are any readers of this blog planning to visit the exhibit? If so, I’d enjoy reading your comments.

Published in 2013, New Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought, by Jeremy Brown (Oxford University Press) is described as the “first comprehensive examination of the Jewish reception of Copernican thought,” spanning four centuries of Jewish commentary on the Copernican model. In his research, Brown also demonstrates the ways in which religions tend to evolve to make room for new scientific findings, however threatening they may have initially appeared to be.

Here is the table of contents:

Introduction
Chapter 1 – Nicolas Copernicus and His Revolution
Chapter 2 – The Talmudic View of the Universe
Chapter 3 – David Gans and the First Mention of Copernicus in Hebrew Literature
Chapter 4 – The First Jewish Copernican: Rabbi Joseph Solomon Delmedigo
Chapter 5 – ”Copernicus Is the Son of Satan.” The First Jewish Rejections of Copernicus
Chapter 6 – David Nieto and Copernicanism in London
Chapter 7 – The Jewish Encyclopedias
Chapter 8 – The Eighteenth Century. Jews and Copernicus in the Newtonian Era
Chapter 9 – ”I Have Written a Book For the Young People.” David Friesenhausen’s Mosdot Tevel
Chapter 10 – The Nineteenth Century: Copernicus Without Hesitation
Chapter 11 – ”Let Copernicus and a Thousand Like Him Be Removed From the World.” Reuven Landau’s Rejection
Chapter 12 – The Modern Period
Chapter 13 – Relativity and Contemporary Jewish Geocentrists
Chapter 14 – Conclusions
Appendix
Bibliography

If any of my readers happen to pick this up, I’d welcome your comments here. Happy new year to all!

Tags: andrea d lobel, andrea lobel, Astronomy, Copernican, History of Astronomy, Jeremy Brown, Jewish, Judaism, New Heavens and a New Earth

I greatly look forward to reading the following volume:

Stern, Sacha and Burnett, Charles (Eds.) (2014) Time, Astronomy, and Calendars in the Jewish Tradition. Leiden: Brill.

The table of contents is available here, on the Brill web site, and below, for your convenience.

Tags: andrea d lobel, andrea lobel, Astronomy, calendar, Charles Burnett, History of Astronomy, history of calendar, history of time, Sacha Stern

My article, “From Babylon to Jerusalem: The Roots of Jewish Astrological Symbolism” has now been published in Sky and Symbol (Eds. Nicholas Campion and Liz Greene). The book may be ordered here, at Amazon.com if interested.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Nicholas Campion and Liz Greene

Part One: The Nature of Symbols
Is Astrology a Symbolic Language?
Nicholas Campion

Art, Astronomy, and Symbolism in the Age of Science
Gary Wells

Ritual Ornamentation—From the Secular to the Religious
Pamela Armstrong

Part Two: Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Expressions
The Burning Sun and the Killing Resheph: Proto-Astrological Symbolism and Ugaritic Epic
Ola Wikander

From Babylon to Jerusalem: The Roots of Jewish Astrological Symbolism
Andrea D. Lobel

The Perugia Fountain: An Encyclopaedia of Sky, Culture, and Society
Darrelyn Gunzburg

Theosis, Vision, and the Astral Body in Medieval German Pietism and the Spanish Kabbalah
Elliot Wolfson

‘Chemistry, That Starry Science’: Early Modern Conjunctions of Astrology and Alchemy
Peter Forshaw

Part Three: Astrological Symbols and Modernity
Katherine Maltwood, H. P. Blavatsky, and the Origins of the Glastonbury Landscape Zodiac
Anthony Thorley

The Celestial Imaginary in Weimar Cinema
Jennifer Zahrt

Reading the Future in the Landscape: Astrology in Zanadroandrenaland, Central East Madagascar
Christel Mattheeuws

Receiving the ‘Messengers’: The Astrology of Jung’s Liber Novus
Liz Greene

Tags: andrea d lobel, andrea lobel, Astronomy, history of astrology, History of Astronomy, Judaism, Liz Greene, Nicholas Campion

This online article on research conducted by Dr. Benno van Dalen of the Institute for the History of Science at LMU Munich is a few years old, but too fascinating to gloss over.

Tags: andrea d lobel, andrea lobel, Astronomy, Benno van Dalen, cultural astronomy, ethnoastronomy, History of Astronomy, Islam, Medieval China

Recent Publication:

Living the Lunar Calendar
Edited by Jonathan Ben-Dov, Wayne Horowitz, and John M Steele

This 2012 publication is a rich collection of papers by the editors, as well as Lawrence Schiffman, Sacha Stern, Robert Hannah, and others on the topic of lunar calandars in cultures including the ancient Near East, Christianity, Judaism, China, Japan, ancient Greece, America, and Russia. These papers engage topics including the variability of the lunar calendar, and the effects of this variability and the changing beginning of the month upon religious holiday planning, record keeping, etc. The table of contents of this excellent volume may be found here.

Tags: andrea d lobel, andrea lobel, cultural astronomy, ethnoastronomy, History of Astronomy, history of calendar, history of time, Jewish, Judaism, rabbinic calendar, second temple Judaism

New Book Announcement:

Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge in Second Temple Literature
Edited by Jonathan Ben-Dov, Seth L. Sanders

This new book (August, 2013), emerged from the 2011 conference held at NYU, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Among the contributors to this volume are Jonathan Ben-Dov, Seth L. Sanders, and Annette Yoshiko Reed.  Of special note with respect to astronomy and early Judaism is the article “Networks of Scholars: The Transmission of Astronomical and Astrological Learning between Babylonians, Greeks and Jews”, by Mladen Popović.

I’ve ordered my copy, and greatly look forward to reading the book. I’ll be sure to review it here. (N.B. As of October, 2013,  Amazon lists the book as being available on December 15th.)

Solar and lunar eclipses have captured both the popular and religious imagination through the millennia. Eclipse records — and myths inspired by eclipses — date back to the earliest historical epochs. These include a multitude of cuneiform tablet eclipse calculations from Mesopotamia, where total solar eclipses served not merely as awe-inspiring events, but as vital religious omens as well.

Today, eclipses are well understood from a scientific standpoint. However, folk traditions surrounding eclipses remain a part of many cultures around the world, as the following articles in the Globe and Mail (Canada) and The New York times attest. In India, for example, one belief is that pregnant women should remain indoors during an eclipse, so as to avoid any harmful effects upon the fetus.

This week’s solar eclipse will begin on July 22nd at 00:51:17 (Universal Time) off the Indian coast, and is notable due to its extremely long maximum totality period of 6 minutes and 39 seconds. That won’t happen again for nearly 150 years.

Those interested in following the eclipse path may be interested in the following sites:

http://www.hermit.org/Eclipse/2009-07-22/

http://www.markstravelnotes.com/travelogues/2009/total_eclipse/eclipse_path/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z59WVrCxAR8