Library

Founding school

Da Mesopotâmia à escola helenística de Alexandria

From Mesopotamia to the Hellenistic school of Alexandria (tablets from the 2nd millennium bce; the Hellenistic synthesis from the 2nd century bce onward). The earliest written records of astrology are cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia: the omen series Enuma Anu Enlil and the astronomical compendium MUL.APIN, copied by generations of temple scribes. The zodiac of twelve equal signs is born in Babylon around the 5th century bce. It is in Hellenistic Egypt that the reading of the sky becomes an individual chart: the school of Alexandria fuses Babylonian calculation, the Egyptian decans and Greek geometry. Its masters left the canons we still read: Ptolemy (Tetrabiblos), Vettius Valens (Anthologiae), and later Firmicus Maternus (Mathesis) — all with verified editions in this library's corpus.

Held in the tradition: the ancient astrologers themselves credited their art to founders older than any document — Hermes, king Nechepso and the priest Petosiris, the mythic lineage the manuals cited with reverence — who tells it: the Hellenistic authors (Valens and Firmicus cite this lineage in their treatises). What was lost, what is kept: much of the Hellenistic literature reached us in fragments and quotations; what survived was preserved in Byzantine compilations and Arabic translations, and is being retranslated by modern critical editions.