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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.

Uruk is the only other site apart from Babylon where all major categories of Babylonian astral science1 are represented in cuneiform tablets. Although the number of tablets from Uruk with astral science is small compared to Babylon, they are especially relevant for reconstructing the context, development and transmission of astral science during the 1st millennium BCE. This is because most tablets from Uruk were excavated scientifically, unlike those from Babylon. Hence we know, albeit to varying degrees of precision, at which locations and in which stratigraphical layers they were found2 – information that is essential for the present investigation.3 In Uruk, the full range of Babylonian astral science is best represented in the Late Seleucid library of the Rēš, temple of the skygod Anu. Since this library and the scholars associated with it have been the subject of detailed investigations,4 the focus is shifted here to libraries from the preceding Neo Babylonian, Achaemenid and Early Seleucid periods. Three libraries in Uruk that predate the Rēš have yielded tablets with astral science: the library of the Eanna temple, that of Anu-ikṣur and his family and that of Iqīšâ and his family, two private libraries located in the same house (fig. 1). While all three have been surveyed elsewhere in the literature, the present contribution attempts to trace the development and the transfer of Babylonian astral science in and between these libraries in more detail.

Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Keilschrifttafel BM 76488, auf der ein bisher unbekanntes babylonisches Handbuch zu Planetenphänomenen teilweise erhalten ist. In mehreren der erhaltenen Sektionen werden Perioden zu Planetenpaaren zugeordnet – ein Thema, das an keiner anderen Stelle in der mesopotamischen Sternkunde belegt ist. In der präsentierten Analyse wird vorgeschlagen, dass einige der Perioden das empirisch erfasste Verhalten von Planetenkonjunktionen beschreiben.

THE ANCIENT EXACT SCIENCES are the main subject in this collection of papers, offered in honor of Lis Brack-Bernsen by her colleagues and friends. The topics of the articles are linked by the themes that have been at the center of much of Lis’s own work: the Babylonian observational record, and the relationship between observation and theory; the gnomon, sundials, and time measurement; and the relationship between different scientific activities in the ancient world, especially the connections between mathematics and astronomy. Lis Brack-Bernsen has been a key figure in tranforming the study of Babylonian astronomy from an almost exclusive focus on the mathematical astronomy of the late period to embracing a much broader consideration of all aspects of the subject, both early and late, mathematical and observational, astronomical and astrological, and their relationships between one another. The papers demonstrate the wide variety of questions asked and approaches used by historians of ancient science.

This study traces the development of the concept of geographical longitude: from the ear- liest known Mesopotamian evidence of geographical concepts through its incorporation into mathematical astronomy and to its transmission to ancient Greek philosophy and scholarship. We show that there is a tight connection between the observation of lunar eclipses and the development of a quantitative representation of terrestrial longitudes. It was not until Ptolemy that geographical longitude was systematically quantified through angular differences. It is demonstrated that the ancient scholars failed in their attempts to determine geographical longitude by astronomical means, and that even certain Syriac texts which specify how to determine longitude using a planispheric astrolabe were unable to resolve this scientific challenge.