Cities That Calculated the Stars — From Clay-Tablet Predictions to Elliptical Orbits
Seven scenes connect Babylonian clay-tablet ephemerides, geometric models at Alexandria, comparison among computational traditions at Ujjain, repeated observation at Raqqa, observatory communities at Maragheh and Samarkand, and the reconstruction of Mars at Prague. The route asks how different sites, instruments, tables, translations, and calculating labour changed what it meant to predict the same sky.
Scene 1 of 7
c. 300 BCE
Babylon
Planetary Tables on Clay — Turning the Night Sky into Columns of Rules
Late Babylonian scribes used generations of observations and sexagesimal calculation to predict lunar and planetary positions in arithmetic tables. Procedures now called System A and System B were especially effective at repeatedly finding the next value without drawing a physical cause for the heavens. Tablets excavated at Babylon are important traces of this practice, not proof that all Mesopotamian astronomy was invented in one city at one moment.
Replay on the map from scene 1Scene index