Babylonian
- Where
- Mesopotamia, the cities of the lower Tigris and Euphrates
- When
- roughly the eighth to the first century BCE
- What survives
- Cuneiform tablets, including dated observational records and horoscopes, read directly rather than through later summary.
21 entries
- Aquarius
Aquarius's Babylonian name is a status title, not a description of pouring water; the water comes from the god's picture, not from the name itself.
- Aries
Aries opens the tropical zodiac at the March equinox itself; its Babylonian figure was a hired farmhand, not a ram.
- Cancer
The narrowest of the twelve like-named constellations, and the one whose divine counterpart may have been an empty shrine rather than an animal.
- Capricorn
A goat with a fish's tail is not a natural animal, and it is the one zodiacal hybrid that survived Babylon to the present essentially unchanged.
- Ea
The Mesopotamian god of the abyssal waters, and the single figure standing behind three of the twelve zodiac constellations rather than one.
- Essential Dignity
Domicile, exaltation, triplicity, bound and face: the fivefold scheme, its sources, and the three places where the surviving texts do not agree.
- Gemini
The Ptolemaic bounds of Gemini split the transmission: Lilly's row, which most software ships as Ptolemaic, disagrees with every Greek edition.
- Jupiter
The brightest true planet after Venus, completing the ecliptic in under twelve years, roughly a sign a year, the arithmetic behind its period-marking use.
- Leo
The Sun's sole domicile, and home to Regulus, one of the four bright stars near the ecliptic.
- Libra
The only sign figured as an object: a Babylonian balance, a Greek claw, and a Roman restoration credited to Julius Caesar.
- Mars
The reddest of the five true planets, with the widest brightness swing and the largest retrograde loop of the seven, both from its varying distance.
- Mercury
Mercury never strays far from the Sun and is visible only near dawn or dusk; it is also the one planet exalted in the sign it already rules.
- Moon
The fastest of the seven, covering about 13 degrees a day, which makes it the body most sensitive to an error in birth date or time zone.
- Pisces
Zero degrees of tropical Aries currently falls inside the constellation Pisces: the concrete case behind the whole tropical-versus-sidereal question.
- Precession of the Equinoxes
The slow westward slide of the equinox against the stars: the rate, who first measured it, and why it separates the seasonal frame from the stellar one.
- Sagittarius
The composite Mesopotamian god Pabilsag was carried into Greek astrology as a plain archer: the clearest case of simplification among the twelve signs.
- Scorpio
Of the thirteen constellations the ecliptic crosses, Scorpius is the narrowest by far, and its missing claws are doing duty as Libra's scales.
- Sun
The Sun rules one sign, holds no bounds, and is the only body whose sign depends on date alone, which is why a newspaper column could use it.
- Taurus
Taurus is a straight translation of the Babylonian Bull of Heaven, but its real distinction is the Pleiades and Hyades within it.
- Venus
Venus was two names, a morning star and an evening star, before the recognition that they were one body collapsed the naming into one.
- Virgo
The sixth sign was a furrow before it was a virgin, and the name of its brightest star still carries the ear of grain the Babylonian figure held.