Outside these fixed stars the signs of the zodiac were perfectly determined in that portion of the celestial vault which the texts designate by the name of harranu (the way), that is to say, the way of the stars. These stars were the planets. The Chaldeans knew of seven, and they were thus known to them: Shamash, the sun; Sin, the moon; Alap-Shamash, Saturn; Rus, Jupiter; Ashbat, Venus; Sulpa-sadu, Mars; Nivit-Anu, Mercury. The Ninevite savants borrowed their astronomical knowledge from the Chaldeans; they made use of the calendar as it was transmitted to them, and as such it has been used by all nations from the remotest times up to the present day.
The Assyrian year was composed of twelve lunar months. It began with the new moon preceding the vernal equinox. A well-known tablet thus fixes the day of the equinoxes: “At the sixth day of the month of Nisan (March) the days and nights are equal (and comprise), six kashbu for the day and six kashbu for the night. May Nabu and Marduk be propitious to the King, my Lord.”
To correct the error resulting from the difference between the lunar and solar year, a supplementary month was intercalated, the length of which necessarily varied with circumstances. The Ninevite tablets offer us calendars arranged in conformity with the different exigencies of life. Some are purely scientific, and show us the divisions of the year into days, months, and seasons. Others are formed to meet the needs of religion, and tell us, by the day, the feasts consecrated to divinities invoked or honoured by special ceremonies. Others seem to take current superstitions into account; thus days are marked by a particular sign, according as they are considered propitious or disastrous. We see tables constructed to indicate the influence of the stars on each day of the year, with a mention of appropriate prayers, to propitiate favourable auguries and ward off those which are fatal.
The importance of these last documents must not be exaggerated; they are related to superstitions common to all ages and lands; and, in the ancient East, as everywhere else, these beliefs merely represent one of the most curious, but the least interesting phases of the aberrations of the human mind.[g]
FOOTNOTES
[33] [This probably means that the father had been called to a high office.]
[34] [This is a letter from King Ammidatitana, the king who was third from the end of the first Babylonian dynasty. It is an example of the usual style of a royal letter.]
[35] For a description of these monuments and the history of their discovery, as well as for the conclusions which are to be drawn from them for the history of art in Mesopotamia, the reader is referred to De Sarsac’s album of reproductions [l’Art Chaldéen], also to L. Heerzey, Les fouilles de Chaldée in the Revue Archæologique, 1881, new series, vol. xlii, p. 56 ff. and 257.
[36] Here of course only architecture and sculpture in general are intended, without denying that the Semites, also those of Babylonia and Assyria have accomplished original things in single cases, in execution, and in certain genres, as, for example, in the reproduction of animal forms.
