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This article introduces a double issue comprising 11 papers about Babylonian and Egyptian priests and scholarship between ca. 600 bce and 200 ce. They constitute the proceedings of the workshop "Scholars, Priests, and Temples: Babylonian and Egyptian Science in Context", which was held at the Humboldt University Berlin, 12–14 May 2016, with support of the Excellence Cluster TOPOI. The workshop brought together Assyriologists and Egyptologists with expertise in Babylonian and Egyptian scholarship, priesthoods and temple institutions. All contributions have been revised and updated since then. The present contribution offers a brief introduction on previous research, cross-cultural interactions, economic aspects, royal patronage, and internal developments of Babylonian and Egyptian temple scholarship, followed by short summaries of the papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses developments in the prediction of weather phenomena in Late Babylonian scholarly texts. Previously published and unpublished texts are analyzed and the underlying methods are compared with omen-based weather prognostication, developments in Babylonian astronomical prediction and reporting practices in the astronomical diaries. It is found that some texts combine long-term astronomical prediction with inferential methods for predicting weather phenomena. It is argued that these new methods for predicting weather phenomena are part of a larger Babylonian effort to predict and explain non-astronomical phenomena by relating them to predictable astronomical phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mathematical tablet BM 46550 offers the first evidence that a method for computing and verifying reciprocal numbers, thus far attested only in the Old Babylonian era, continued to be applied, in a similar manner, in the Neo- or Late Babylonian era. At least part of the tablet was computed on the spot, some of the columns being written from bottom to top. The mathematical tables are accompanied by an unusual drawing, apparently unrelated to the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]