Near East

The Old Babylonian Atrahasīs epic details the creation of man from clay mixed with the flesh and blood of an immortal god. Accordingly, in ancient Mesopotamia, humans were thought to have a part that survived death. This surviving part was called “ghost” (eṭemmu in Akkadian/gedim in Sumerian). After a proper burial, the ghosts of the dead dwelled in the netherworld, a distant part of the cosmos governed by the goddess Ereshkigal and her spouse Nergal. Since ghosts not only preserved part of their former human identity but also hunger, thirst, and the need for attention, their peaceful rest depended on the care offered by their living kin in the form of the offerings and commemorative rites that constituted the core of Mesopotamian family religion. If these funerary rituals were neglected or a corpse was not buried properly, ghosts turned into restlessly roaming or evil ghosts that plagued the living, akin to demons, and caused all kinds of distress.

The Astronomical Diaries are Akkadian texts from Babylon which contain observations of astronomical phenomena and selected events on earth. They are written in the cuneiform script and preserved on several hundred clay tablets, most of which are today in the British Museum.

Very few of the tablets are complete, and some are in an extremely fragmentary state. Where no date formula survives, it is often possible to date them based on the astronomical observations recorded. The surviving tablets range in date from the mid-7th to the 1st century bce, but the vast majority date between 400 and 60 bce.

Diaries usually cover periods of four to six months, divided into monthly sections. Daily astronomical observations form the bulk of each section. At the end of each month, the Diaries report the river level of the Euphrates; the market exchange values of several commodities in Babylon, and sometimes selected historical events such as warfare, disease outbreaks, visits from kings or officials, and cultic activities. The Diaries contain no explicit indications of purpose, but since they exhibit significant parallelism with prognostic material, it is likely that they were connected to some extent with divination. There are also parallels in content and phrasing between the Diaries and the Late Babylonian Chronicles.

In the history of mathematics, differences between ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek mathematics have been emphasized while their parallels have often been overlooked. While the source material of the earliest Greek mathematical texts is probably too scarce to trace its beginnings, a comparison of extant Egyptian and Greek sources reveals not only differences but also similarities. It is noteworthy in this respect that specific links to Egyptian and also Mesopotamian mathematical sources can be drawn, which indicates that the mathematical knowledge of both cultures served as the basis for the evolution of Greek mathematics. Instead of contrasting Greek mathematics with its Egyptian predecessors, our understanding of ancient Greek mathematics and its development might benefit from studying the transmission and common features of these mathematical cultures.

Mathematicians often consider ancient Greece as the birthplace of their subject. Names like Pythagoras or Euclid are still used in modern mathematics in the designation of theorems (Pythagorean theorem) or areas (Euclidean geometry), establishing a link between modern mathematics and its supposed origin in ancient Greece.

The “Epic of Erra” is a major Babylonian literary composition, dating from the first half of the 1st millennium bce. The text describes the horrors of war, caused by the god Erra running amok, in an unusually rich imagery of destruction, unrest, and misery. It is a very dynamic composition with a high proportion of dialogues that push the plot forward. Erra’s furious heart is eventually pacified, and peace then returns to Babylonia.

The Babylonian literary text known as “Epic of Erra” is sometimes also called “Song of Erra” or “Erra and Ishum.”¹

The composition tells the story of Erra, the god of war and pestilence, who, instigated by his seven divine weapons (the Sebetti), decides to wreak havoc in Babylonia. He leaves his temple in the city of Cutha and travels to Babylon, where he convinces the city’s tutelary deity (the god Marduk) to leave his divine throne and take his insignia to be cleaned and repaired. Erra volunteers to take care of Babylon during Marduk’s absence. With this trickery and Marduk leaving his divine abode, Erra should have had immediate free rein to execute his plans of bringing about war and destruction to Babylonia. However, it takes some time for Erra to initiate his destructive work. First, the gods try to negotiate the issue in their divine assembly and to convince Erra to abandon his plans. Unfortunately, this part of the composition is still very fragmentarily preserved, but the extant parts of the text seem to indicate that Marduk returns and takes part in the discussions in the divine assembly. Erra’s rage and hunger for war increases, and finally, he is able to start his ravage because even with Marduk's return, the cosmic order is still too unstable to stop Erra in his rage.

Nebuchadnezzar II was one of the most famous Babylonian kings and the most prominent ruler of the Neo-Babylonian period. After inheriting the throne from his father Nabopolassar, he successfully ruled Babylonia for more than forty years. During this time, he secured and enlarged the empire that his father had founded, strengthened Babylonian military dominance in the Levant against Egypt, claimed supremacy over Judah by conquering its capital, Jerusalem, twice and exiled the upper stratum of Judah’s population in Babylonia. According to extant sources, the main focus of Nebuchadnezzar’s politics was in the Syro-Palestine area; little is known about his policies towards his eastern neighbour Media. In Babylonia, Nebuchadnezzar sponsored large-scale construction work all over the country, but he paid special attention to his capital, Babylon, which he transformed into the most splendid and world-famous megacity, a metropolis that was praised centuries later and is still the basis for the modern image of Babylon.

Hellenic philosophy died a lingering death even before Islam appeared. The Christianization of the Roman empire, and the increasing self-identification by the Greek-speaking population as Romans in the so-called Byzantine age, rendered Hellenic philosophy the object of scorn. By the end of the 6th century, philosophy was neither practised nor taught, nor were philosophical texts copied. In addition, all Greek texts, and not only the philosophical ones, went through two periods of sifting in their physical transmission—from papyrus rolls to codices (3rd–4th centuries) and from uncial writing to minuscule script (8th–9th centuries)—at the end of which only a small fraction survived.

By late antiquity the Hellenic philosophical and scientific corpus had been organized into a potent curriculum, based on the classification of the sciences originally introduced by Aristotle, which represented the sum total of human knowledge. It was received as such by the Hellenized peoples of the Near East, who had been participating in the philosophical enterprise in Greek. As the practice of philosophy attenuated in the Greek-speaking world, Persians in the Sasanian empire, and Arameans, now Christianized into the churches of the East, began translating selectively parts of the philosophical curriculum into Middle Persian and Syriac, respectively. With the emergence of Islam in the 7th century and the subsequent development of scholarship in Arabic, political, social, and cultural exigencies required that the rulers of the new empire participate, own, and promote the high Hellenic culture cultivated amid the Persian- and Syriac-speaking subjects. As a result there was launched a far-flung translation movement into Arabic, from Sanskrit, Middle Persian, Syriac, and especially from Greek, of all sciences and philosophy. The philosophical texts that passed into Arabic were primarily the Aristotelian corpus, the near-totality of which was translated with some notable omissions, and the long list of commentators from Alexander of Aphrodisias to the last Neoplatonists of Alexandria. The Platonic tradition was not favoured, Platonism having been proscribed in Greek, and to a lesser degree in Syriac, Christianity. Not a single complete dialogue was translated into Arabic; what was available of Plato was various selections from the dialogues, Galen’s summaries of the dialogues, biographies, and sayings. Selections from Plotinus and Proclus were available in paraphrastic and interpolated versions that were attributed to Aristotle. The remaining schools of Hellenic philosophy, already extinct long before the rise of Islam, were known primarily through quotations among the translated authors like Aristotle and Galen.