A really interesting essay on the Book of Abraham is that of
Hollis R. Johnson, "One Day to
a Cubit," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 3 (2013):
223-230
While source-checking the
essay, I came across the essay by Francesca
Rochberg, “Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Here is the full
quotation for those interested:
A nightly watch of the sky, albeit of an entirely
different nature from that instituted at Nineveh and throughout the Assyrian
Empire for the express purpose of celestial divination, was undertaken at
Babylon from the period of the reign of King Nabonassar (747–734 BCE). Although
no eighth- century BCE examples are preserved, this archive of observational texts
was established at Babylon from the middle of that century, as is indicated in
later compilations of lunar eclipse reports. These so- called astronomical
diaries collected lunar, planetary, meteorological, economic, and occasionally
political events night after night, usually (at least in the later diaries) for
six or seven months of a Babylonian year. The Babylonian astronomers classified
these texts with the rubric “regular (celestial) observation which (extends)
from the xth month of the yth year to the zth month of the
yth year.” The term “diary” is apt because the texts record daily
positions of the moon and planets visible above the local horizon, as in the
following lines from a diary dated in the year 331 BCE:
Night of the 20th, last part of the night, the moon was
[nn cubi]ts below β Geminorum, the moon being 2 / 3 cubit back to the west. The
21st, equinox; I did not watch. Ni[ght of the 22nd, last part of the night,]
[the moon was] 6 cubits [below] ε Leonis, the moon having passed 1 / 2 cubit
behind α Leonis. Night of the 24th, clouds were in the sky. (A. J. Sachs and
Hermann Hunger, Astronomical Diaries and Related texts from Babylonia,
vol. 1: Diaries from 652 B.C. to 262 B.C. [Vienna: Verlag der
Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988], 177, No. 330.)
In this diary of 331 BCE, in the section reserved for
noteworthy political events, there is the report of the defeat of Darius III by
Alexander the Great at Gaugamela. The diary relates that “(in Month VI on the 11th
day) panic occurred in the camp before the king,” and “(on the 24th) the troops
deserted him . . . and fl ed.” The report for the following month contains the
statement, also in broken context, that “Alexander, king of the world, [came
(?) in]to Babylon.” (Ibid.) The astronomical diaries, therefore, compile a
wealth of detail, of political and economic historical value, as well as being
a prodigious source of contemporary dated astronomical observations, no doubt
the source of the Babylonian observations utilized by Ptolemy in the Almagest
(for example, those of Mercury in Almagest 9.7). (Francesca
Rochberg, “Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Wrestling with Nature,
ed. Peter Harrison, Ronald L. Numbers, and Michael Shank [Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011], 18-19)
