Data: 11.03.2025

Arkadiusz Sołtysiak (WArch UW,PL)

Mesopotamian roots of astrology

Streszczenie:
According to the classical sources, astrology as a coherent system of divination was introduced to Greece by Berossos, a priest from Babylon who settled on the island of Kos and established there his school. Indeed, during the Classical Antiquity, educated priests of Mesopotamia had relatively sophisticated tools that allowed them to predict the position of the Sun, the Moon and the planets both forwards and backwards, and to produce individual horoscopes based on the position of the celestial bodies at time of birth. The process leading to the formation and refinement of this system, which lasted for at least 1500 years, may be reconstructed using abundant Assyrian and Babylonian textual sources. The outline of this journey will be presented here.