Thursday, July 18, 2024

Example of "Cubit" being used in the sense of a Degree/Angle in Antiquity

 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)