Babylonian planetary records

Overview

From at least the second millennium BCE, Babylonian scribes systematically recorded the positions of the Moon and planets on clay tablets, culminating in the Venus tablets and the mathematical ephemerides of the Seleucid period. These records turned skywatching into a predictive science: astronomers could forecast eclipses and planetary appearances using period relations and arithmetic schemes. Babylonian data and methods later fed directly into Greek astronomy, where Hipparchus and Ptolemy built geometrical models on top of centuries of observations.

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