NEW LIGHT ON MUL.APIN Writing Science Before the Greeks: A Naturalistic Analysis of the Babylonian Astronomical Treatise MUL.APIN. Rita Watson and Wayne Horowitz (Brill, Leiden, 2011). Pp. xxviii + 224. euro97. ISBN 978-90-04-20230-6.This new study of the Akkadian astronomical 'compendium' MUL.APIN, or 'Plough Star' , is the result of a collaboration between Rita Watson, a developmental psychologist, and Wayne Horowitz, an Assyriologist. MUL.APIN, attested mainly through tablets and fragments from Assyria from the seventh century b.c. and later ones from Babylonia, was likely composed between the twelfth and the seventh century b.c. The authors subject this well-studied composition to a new form of analysis rooted in the cognitive sciences, an approach that has rarely, if at all, been applied to cuneiform texts. The starting point of their study is the existing authoritative edition of MUL. APIN by Hermann Hunger and David Pingree (1989), whose translation is reproduced at the end of the book. Since only insignificant new fragments have been discovered since 1989, a new philological edition is not provided. In chap. 1 the authors explain why they selected MUL.APIN, a rare example of a well-preserved scholarly cuneiform text, extant in a single canonical version whose composition reflects some process of gradual incorporation of distinct layers of scientific knowledge. In §1.5 the authors introduce their central argument that is worked out in detail in chap. 4, namely that the structure of MUL.APIN shows a progression towards 'higher' levels of astronomical knowledge. As I will suggest below, this claim is open to debate. A minor point of critique concerns the term 'naturalistic' , whose meaning is explained as grounding cultural explanation in the biological substrates of human cognition (p. 20). It remains unclear why this somewhat confusing term is used instead of the more readily understandable 'cognitive' .Chap. 2 provides a useful introduction to cognitive aspects of writing. Writing allows permanent storage of information, thereby reducing the load on working memory and increasing the amount of information that can be utilized for a task. Moreover, it allows for rereading and reinterpretation, without which a complex scientific text such as MUL.APIN could not be composed and used. The authors argue that the more analysis a text requires ('inferential demands'), the more pronounced are the cognitive effects of writing. Accidentally, this would suggest that the vast corpus of Mesopotamian astrological omens and the scholarly commentaries associated with it may represent a better test case for their cognitive analysis, since these texts require even greater analytical and interpretative skills than MUL.APIN (cf. David Brown, Mesopotamian planetary astronomy-astrology, 2000).Chap. 3 discusses the frames of reference, categories and concepts underlying MUL. APIN. They function as diagnostics of cognitive change in the next chapter, which contains a section-by-section analysis of MUL.APIN. The results are summarized in chap. 5, which includes very interesting observations about the structure of MUL. APIN that seem to have escaped other investigators. As remarked earlier, the authors uncover a systematic development in MUL. ??G? towards increasing abstraction and complexity regarding the use of spatial and temporal reference frames, rhetorical devices, taxonomy of stars, formulation of procedures, definitions and axioms. …