Pathways into the Study of Ancient Sciences

Abstract

The book under review is a selection of essays from prodigious oeuvre of David Pingree (1933-2005), foremost scholar of ancient astral in Near Eastern, Indian, and Greco-Latin texts. This collection of 33 papers, produced over course of four decades from 1963 to 2003, was edited by Isabelle Pingree and John M. Steele. They have brought previously published papers hitherto scattered in sometimes difficult to obtain journals and volumes together as a useful and representative collection.Pingree was concerned with what he called the history of exact ... as practiced in ancient Mesopotamia, in ancient and medieval Greece, India, and Latin-speaking West, and in medieval Islam (p. 3). Through his life's work, Pingree showed concretely by study of manuscripts and their histories that, in fact, exact sciences, as represented in these materials, sometimes widely separated both geographically and chronologically, constituted a single integral historical field.The opening section of general studies focuses on topics related to transmission, translation, and mingling of textual traditions from Indus Valley in east to Europe in west. The editors' choice to open with set piece Hellenophilia and history of (1992) is a good one. It presents Pingree's aim to study history of science as a matter of written sources in context, with further consequence that essential to study of science in history are subjects whichwere or are within contexts of cultures in which they once flourished or now are practiced ... and that intellectual content must be related to culture that produced and nourished each, and to social context within which each arose and developed [p. 3] ... If my definition of science as it must be viewed by a historian is accepted, it is easy to show that and certain learned forms of divination, magic, alchemy, and so on are sciences [p. 8] ... Much of my argument has been based on anthropological perception that science is not apprehension of an external set of truths that mankind is progressively acquiring a greater knowledge of, but that rather are products of human culture [p. 12].These statements clarify Pingree's fundamentally context-driven historiographical approach and reflect, arguably, central commitment of his research. The sciences, from his point of view, are comprised of a plurality of local traditions of knowledge that were never simply transmitted but always bound up with other parts of contexts in which they existed and continued to have value.Arguing for legitimacy of study of as science in history, introductory section of volume moves on to an encyclopaedia entry defining ancient and making distinction between Babylonian celestial divination and astrology, former being about omens, latter about celestial influence in a physical (effective) way. This definition is further specified in lengthy From Alexandria to Baghdad to Byzantium: The transmission of astrology as interpretation of horoscopic diagram representing positions of planets and zodiacal signs at moment of a native's conception or (p. 18), and places invention of this system with Greeks in Egypt ca. 100 C.E. D. Greenbaum and M. Ross have argued thatvarying definitions of alter identification of horoscopes in antiquity ... and historical conclusions drawn from these pieces of evidence. In fact, depending on which definition is used, origin of horoscope could have occurred in Babylon, Egypt or Greece.[1]Pingree's definition, quoted before, also precisely describes cuneiform horoscopes that represent positions of planets and zodiacal signs at moment of birth or conception.[2] The article From Alexandria to Baghdad to Byzantium traces lines of descent from Greek astrological manuscripts from Alexandrea to Sanskrit translations made in mid-second to third centuries of our era. …