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Network Transmissions of Scholarly Knowledge Between Babylonians And Network Transmissions of Scholarly Knowledge between Babylonians and Jews CRASIS Annual Meeting 2012 Mladen Popović, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen 1. Introduction Simplicius, the late-antique commentator on Aristotle’s works, wrote that (according to Porphyry) Aristotle had asked Callisthenes, who was in Babylon with Alexander the Great, to send from Babylon astronomical observations to Greece.1 In De caelo Aristotle himself refers to observational data by the Egyptians and the Babylonians as the basis for much of their (i.e. the Greeks’) evidence about particular luminaries.2 Regardless of whether such a request was really made by Aristotle, the anecdote illustrates how some in late antiquity imagined such intercultural contacts and the transmission of knowledge between Babylon and Greece: reports were simply sent from Babylon directly to Greece by a Greek visitor of certain status. Unfortunately, the anecdote does not really provide us with much concrete information. The nature of the reports is not specified, nor their number: what kind of sources and how many? Nor is it clear what language they were in (a late-antique writer would probably not have thought of Akkadian anymore):3 did Simplicius imagine the reports were in Greek? Also, there is no explanation 1 FGrH 124 T 3. 2 292a. There is no reason to think that Aristotle made any such request to Callisthenes. More likely, Aristotle’s reference in De caelo to observational data from the Babylonians set commentators thinking how the information could have been obtained, and one obvious hypothesis, it seems, was that Callisthenes supplied it,2 although that ignores the reference to the Egyptians. 3 Cf., however, M.J. Geller, “The Last Wedge,” ZA 87 (1997): 43–95 (50). For an argument about the Greeks’ lack of interest in learning others’ languages, see A. Westenholz, “The Graeco-Babyloniaca Once Again,” ZA 97 (2007): 262–313 (275–78). See also A. Momigliano, “The Fault of the Greeks,” Daedalus 104/2 (1975): 9–19 (15). 1 as to how exactly Callisthenes obtained these sources or through whom. It was not as if astronomical reports were just lying around to be picked up by anyone. How did he know where to go? Did Callisthenes walk into a temple in Babylon, the Esangila, for example? Did he know individual Babylonian astronomers? 4 Such questions were probably not on Simplicius’ mind, but from a socio-historical perspective on science we need to address some of these questions as to possession, accessibility and mobility in order to better understand the transmission of scholarly knowledge, in this case astronomical learning. In this presentation I wish to offer some reflections on the transmission of astronomical learning in ancient Judaism. Previous research has assumed, tacitly or explicitly, that Jewish scholars had direct access to Babylonian centres of learning.5 Indirect evidence in ancient sources has been adduced to support such inferences; one can think, for example, of the portrayal of Daniel’s position at the Neo-Babylonian court. Insights from Social Network Analysis theory may help to conceptualize concrete conditions for the transmission of knowledge, in this case between Babylonian and Jewish astronomical and astrological learning during the first millennium B.C.E., by focusing on social relationships and with a special emphasis on networks. How and through whom did ancient Jewish scholars get to know about some of the things that Babylonian scholars knew? On the level of textual comparisons, it is evident that elements of Babylonian origin appear in ancient Jewish texts; this is not disputed at all. However, the occurrence of 4 For a brief discussion of individual astronomers known by name to Greco-Roman authors as Chaldean astronomers, see Jones, “Evidence for Babylonian Arithmetical Schemes in Greek Astronomy,” 88–89; Geller, “The Last Wedge,” 49; T. Boiy, Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylon (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 297 n. 24. See also below for an inscription from Larisa in Thessaly that refers to a certain Antipater from Hierapolis as a Chaldean astronomer. Of course, there are numerous references to the ‘Chaldeans’ and their skills in Greek and Latin sources, but they function more often than not as stock characters for authors to talk about astrologers or their skills. Not much specific information as to the transmission of their learning or in what respect it was of Babylonian origin can be gleaned from these sources. The references to the expulsion of ‘Chaldeans’ from Rome indicate that they were regarded as undesirable for various reasons at various times, but these references hardly give us specific data as to the concrete people and circumstances involved. 5 See, for example, the discussion and references in J. Ben-Dov, Head of All Years: Astronomy and Calendars at Qumran in their Ancient Context (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 266, 270–75. See also H. Drawnel, The Aramaic Astronomical Book (4Q208-4Q211) from Qumran: Text, Commentary, and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51, 53, 70, 301, 304, and the contribution by James VanderKam in this volume, p. XXX. 2 textual similarities alone does not constitute enough evidence to argue for a direct chain of transmission. At least we need to further qualify the character of that connection. That Babylonian learning travelled far beyond its original geographic boundaries is undisputed, as is the fact that elements from the Enochic Astronomical Book, an early Jewish text, are ultimately rooted in earlier Babylonian astronomical models. Ancient sources also acknowledge such Babylonian origins, and we have examples of Jewish texts that put Abraham on a par with scholars from Egypt, Phoenicia and Babylon. Such anecdotes suggest that scholarly knowledge was exchanged in direct interaction between learned men. In general, such interaction no doubt shaped ancient contexts of transmission, but in concrete cases we probably have to differentiate: not all learned men would, as a rule, have interacted with all learned men from other cultural realms, this being dependent on various factors. My concerns in this presentation will circle around two issues that I find interesting to explore further. The first issue is that of ethnicity and intercultural contacts with regard to learned knowledge. The second issue is that of differentiation between different levels of learning on the one hand and how that is manifested through social relations between learned individuals on the other hand. In this presentation I argue that the transmission of Babylonian learning to Jewish scholars in Palestine was not a direct one and also that it went through different channels than the transmission of Babylonian astronomical science to Greek scholars. The level of learning that we encounter in early Jewish sources differs from contemporary developments in Babylonian and Greek astronomical science and points to a different trajectory of transmission. We should not assume as fact that Jewish scholars had direct access to Babylonian schools. We have no evidence for this. Due to the nature of the evidence at our disposal we cannot be very specific about the concrete ways in which 3 Babylonian scholarship reached Jewish Palestine sometime during the second half of the first millennium B.C.E. 2. Intercultural Transmission of Scholarly Knowledge In the wake of the Babylonian conquest of Judah and Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. a Jewish Diaspora formed in the east, in Babylon. Jews integrated fully in economic every-day life in Babylonia, as “is evidenced by their participation in very ordinary economic transactions in which they are recorded as the creditors and debtors in a variety of loan documents and receipts.”6 There is enough evidence for Babylonian Jewish villagers or merchants in Neo- and Late-Babylonian documents, but we do not as yet have evidence for Jews accessing scholarly tablet collections directly. In general, the Babylonian temple archives indicate only a very small percentage of foreigners.7 Modern anthropological and cultural studies have pointed out that social boundaries are often, in reality, fluid and fuzzy. Nonetheless, that boundaries are fluid, fuzzy or that they can be crossed does not imply the non-existence of such boundaries; boundaries are not completely ephemeral, sometimes they are very real. While ethno-linguistic and cultural borders can be crossed, they also function to create a persistent sense of difference.8 In ancient Babylon ethno-linguistic boundaries may not have been absolute, but some form of boundary maintenance with regard to accessibility to and dissemination of literary and scholarly texts did seem to have been in effect. When we look at evidence from the Neo- and Late-Babylonian periods, it seems that the Babylonian urban elite had stricter 6 L. Pearce, “New Evidence for Judeans in Babylonia,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (ed. O. Lipschits and M. Oeming; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 399–411 (402). 7 Zadok, “The Representation of Foreigners in Neo- and Late-Babylonian Legal Documents,” 482–84. 8 There is an enormous amount of scholarly discussion on these issues. For interesting insights in this discussion, from a different field of study than Jewish or cuneiform, see, e.g., D. W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 4 limitations for entry into the scholarly elite than the Assyrians had before them during the Neo-Assyrian period.9 In addition to the Babylonian priests and scholars—the old urban nobility—there was, however, another group of scribes. The so-called sepīru scribes did not belong to the old Babylonian nobility, but they were recognized as important persons who were well integrated in the temple organisation.10 They appear to have been originally Aramaic speakers who had assimilated into Babylonian culture.11 The exact relations between Babylonian scholarly elite and Aramaic sepīru scribes—who were well integrated in the temple organisation—merit further investigation.
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