BM 76488 - a Babylonian Compendium about Conjunctions and other Planetary Phenomena

Abstract

This paper discusses the cuneiform tablet BM 76488, which partly preserves a hitherto
unknown Babylonian compendium about planetary phenomena. In several of the preserved
sections, periods are assigned to pairs of planets – a topic not attested elsewhere in
Mesopotamian astral science. The analysis presented here suggests that some of the periods
describe the empirical behavior of planetary conjunctions.

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