Babylonian Astronomy

The observations were kept for the sake of omens: it was held that the fate of king and country could be read in the sky. But the records piled up over centuries, and order emerged in them. The Mul-Apin tablets list the stars and the times of their rising; the astronomical diaries note, day by day, the positions of the planets, the weather, and the market prices. From here come the division of the circle into three hundred and sixty parts, the seven-day week, the zodiac, and the art of computing eclipses in advance. Cuneiform remained in use into the first century CE — and the last tablets are precisely astronomical.