Astronomy—the careful observation of the stars, sun, and moon—has been an important human activity for tens of thousands of years. As hunting and gathering people, it was critical for people to understand the seasons when they could travel to resource areas at the right time. If they traveled to a river to harvest spawning fish and got there too early or too late, they would starve. The same was true of plant gathering areas and game hunting areas. Thus they had to know and understand the seasons and to do this they looked at the heavens.
With the development of agriculture and a more sedentary life style about 10,000 years ago, astronomy assumed new importance. Not only was it needed to determine when to plant the crops, but living in permanent villages and cities meant that the stars could be viewed from the same point. With the development of writing, astronomical observations could be written down and accurately passed on through the generations.
In ancient Babylon there was a special group of scribes who observed and recorded the movements of the stars and planets. They recorded their observations about the daily, monthly, and yearly positions of the stars and the planets. These observations were recorded in a work known as the Astronomical Diaries (currently housed in the British Museum).
With regard to astronomical observations, the scribes recorded on a daily basis the positions of the moon, eclipses, solstices, equinoxes, the positions of the planets, and the rising and setting of Sirius. In addition, they recorded important political events and correlated these with their celestial phenomena. Over hundreds of years, the astronomers kept records and compiled archives of information about stars, planets, and omens. They would consult these archives to explain events and to make predictions.
Astronomy, with its observations based on early scientific methods, is thus used as a form of divination, more commonly called astrology. Divination seeks to see the causes about why things happen and to thus predict outcomes of human activities. All people want to know what the future will bring, and astrology is one way of predicting it. Divination is important in many different religious traditions.
Babylonian divination using astronomy was based on the idea that association is tantamount to causality. Thus if two events occur in close proximity, one must be responsible for the other. Thus if a successful event had been recorded when the stars were aligned in a particular pattern, then other events which take place then the stars are once again aligned in the pattern will be successful. Babylonian rulers made few important decisions without consulting with the astronomers so that they could predict the outcome of the event. Babylonians believed that one’s destiny was written in the sky.
In looking at the stars, the Babylonian astronomers connected the stellar dots to name constellations. Ten of these constellations became later fixed in the cosmic thinking of Greece and Rome and are still used in contemporary astrology: the bull became Taurus; twins became Gemini; a crab became Cancer; a lion became Leo; balance-scales became Libra; a scorpion become Scorpio; an archer became Sagittarius; a creature resembling a goat became Capricorn; and a man bearing water became Aquarius.
They were also the first to describe the galactic stars that spill across the night sky as the Milky Way.
Like many other people, the Babylonians developed a calendar with 12 lunar months. With this calendar there were 354 days in a year. However, the solar year is about 365 days long. Thus the two do not coincide which means that the months don’t correspond to the seasons.
The Babylonian astronomer/scribes designed an accurate lunar calendar. Sometime before 503 BCE, they introduced a regularly inserted intercalary month. The Babylonian astronomers found that 235 lunar months are almost identical to 19 solar years: the difference is only two hours. They concluded that seven out of nineteen years ought to be leap years with an extra month.
While the United States has adopted a calendar system that is somewhat different from that of the Babylonians, their concept of astrology as a form of divination is still important to many people. It has been widely reported, for example, that President Ronald Reagan consulted astrology in making decisions regarding the United States.