Ancient Astrologers Used Advanced Math to Track Planets

    CHICAGO, IL, February 11, 2016 /24-7PressRelease/ -- A new study in Science magazine reports that ancient Babylonian astrologers combined their sophisticated knowledge of geometry with a rudimentary form of integral calculus to track the path and apparent changing velocity of orbiting planets through the night sky more than 1,400 years before historians believed any ancient peoples had the mathematical savvy needed to pull this off.

Professor Mathieu Ossendrijver from Berlin's Humboldt University told the BBC News World Service Science in Action programme that the telltale evidence for his finding had been hiding in plain sight for decades in the British Museum in London.

Ossendrijver said the geometry used by the Babylonians was a very special kind not found anywhere else in the ancient world.

"I wasn't expecting this result," he said.

The ancient Babylonians once lived in what is now Iraq and Syria. The civilization emerged almost 2,000 years before the birth of Christ, and clay tablets engraved with their cuneiform writing system showed them to be inveterate stargazers.

But no one in the modern era suspected the level of competence and sophistication these ancient astrologers exhibited in developing the complex celestial tracking technique they used. The same level of mathematical sophistication didn't emerge in Europe until the 14th century, Ossendrijver said.

The British Museum houses roughly 450 Babylonian clay tablets dating from 400 to 50 BCE. Ossendrijver and his associates located a tablet that had not been formally described and found it contained a partial description of orbiting Jupiter's trek across the night sky.

When combined with information from other related tablets, the professor was able to "piece together a complete story that began with Jupiter's first morning rising, tracked it through its apparent retrograde motion, and finished with its last visible setting at dusk."

In developing their planetary tracking system, ancient Babylonian astrologers moved beyond the spatial relationship between the earth and planets to focus on concepts dealing with time and velocity as well, he said.

Ossendrijver explained that cuneiform tablets small enough to fit in the hand were used to plot and record the apparent decreasing velocity of Jupiter from the planet's first appearance along the horizon to 60 days later, and then 120 days later. When drawn on a graph, the relationship is represented in the shape of two conjoined trapezoids.

The area of each trapezoid describes Jupiter's total displacement (measured in degrees) along the ecliptic, or the path of the sun.

The technique enabled Babylonian astrologers to accurately determine the current celestial location of planets and predict where they'll be found in the future, which was and is essential information for astrologers then and now.

Ossendrijver believes the Babylonians developed this technique around 350 B.C., but it may date back even farther than that. His discovery marked the second time in the century that mathematical and engineering capabilities traced to an ancient people proved to be far superior than once believed.

It took awhile for modern researchers to figure out that a barnacle- encrusted gear box device plucked from a shipwrecked vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera 100 years ago was in fact a highly sophisticated computing mechanism used by ancient astrologers to track the precise positions and trajectories of the sun, moon and planets.

Incredibly, centuries before the birth of Christ, the Antikythera mechanism was being used to accurately predict planetary progress and when solar and lunar eclipses would occur far into the future. Presumably, this accomplishment required a far greater understanding of celestial dynamics than modern historians had believed to be possible in ancient times.

The Astrology News Service (ANS) is jointly sponsored by the American Federation of Astrologers (AFA), the Association for Astrological Networking (AFAN), the International Society for Astrological Research (ISAR),the National Council for Geocosmic Research (NCGR) and the Organization for Professional Astrologers (OPAA).

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