The Horoscope of Anu-Bēlšunu

Abstract

Although only twenty-eight Babylonian horoscope texts are extant, and these few span a long period from Achaemenid to Arsacid times (late fifth century BC to the mid-first century BC), their form and content suggest a well-defined class of astronomical/astrological texts whose purpose it was to record a specific set of astronomical data relevant to the date of the birth of an individual. Although omens based on the date of a birth are known from the series Iqqur ipu1, celestial omens of Enama Anu Enlil predicted mundane events only for the king and the country. The horoscopes therefore represent the first application of celestial prognostication to the individual, and clearly bear close relation to nativity omens, also attested for the first time in late Babylonia.2 The appearance of horoscopes in Achaemenid Babylonia with their various innovative elements, primary among which are the introduction of the zodiac and the consideration of the situation of the heavens as a whole for predicting the life of an individual, signals as yet imperfectly understood changes in late Babylonian intellectual culture concerned with celestial inquiry, as well as with the relation of the individual to the cosmos. Because the number of extant exemplars of Babylonian horoscopes is small, each newly identified text has much to offer for our general understanding of the genre and of the nature of astrology in late Babylonia. During the 1960s, A. Sachs identified most of the extant horoscope texts in the British Museum, but these remained unpublished.3 The recent discovery of another horoscope in the Yale Babylonian Collection is of great interest both for a number of special features not attested in most other horoscopes and for its consistency with the genre as a whole. The new horoscope was identified in 1989 while cataloguing the Newell Collection of Babylonian tablets housed at Yale University.4 The tablet bears the museum number NCBT 1231 and is dated to the Seleucid period. The place of origin is in all probability Uruk since the name of the individual for whom the horoscope was drafted, Anubelunu, is characteristic of, if not exclusive to, the onomastics of that city. Additional internal criteria, derived from the content of the text and its presentation, argue convincingly for Uruk as provenance,5 making this document the sixth horoscope known from Uruk. All other examples of