Ancient Babylonia and Precession

Answer: Almost certainly not.

Facts which Indicate the Ancient Babylonians Would Not Have Had a Movement of the Ages Concept: I'll define Ancient here to mean anytime before the fall of Babylon to Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BC.

* There is essentially no evidence that the Ancient Babylonians practised astrology, as we know it today, before 539 BC.
* Instead their astrology was an Omen Astrology, in which the Moon was the most important object. [See also: Omens Index.] We still have this recorded on thousands of cuneiform tablets that have come down to us.
* Planets were mentioned infrequently and usually with respect to the position of the Moon. The Sun was quite unimportant.
* This was not Zodiac Astrology. The Babylonians had yet to invent the Zodiac as a method for measuring the position of Sun Moon and Planets. This did not occur until the 539 to 332 BC period of Persian Empire rule in Babylon.
* The Ancient Babylonians do not appear to have the same concept of a constellation as we do now. Several had been identified, but more important were individual stars, especially to the workings of their calendar.
* The Ancient Babylonians used calendar months identified by 'three stars each' for calendar purposes, instead of constellations. Each star was from a different band in the sky: northern [Path of Anu], central [Path of Ea] and southern [Path of Enlil]
* The Babylonians don't seem to have considered the Ecliptic to be at all important, in fact its doubtful that they possessed the concept. The closest they came to this idea before 539 BC was the Eighteen Stars of the Path of the Moon.
* The Babylonians, until they received it from the Greeks, did not have the concept of a Celestial Sphere. It's very difficult to come up with the concept of Movement of the Ages without such a frame of reference. In fact - despite their prowess in observing the night sky - they never really developed a framework to understand and predict it.
* From the above it probably not surprising to learn that there is no evidence anywhere in any Babylonian writings of any period that they possessed the concept of an Astrological Age [i.e. one associated via the Vernal Equinox Point with a particular Zodiac Constellation.]

Three Stars Each Tablets - the Ancient Baylonian 'Planisphere' or 'Astrolabe' [c 1000 BC]

The circular cuneiform tablet, pictured abve [held in the British Museum], is an example of a Babylonian 'Three Stars Each' cuneiform astronomical calendar of which the earliest appear c 1000 BC. There is a reference to this system on Tablet five, line four of the Babylonian Creation Story, the Enuma Elish, written down c 1200 BC: 'For the twelve months he [Marduk] fixed three stars.'

The calendar is divided into twelve equal segments - if you look below the central hole of the tablet you can see lines radiating out to form the six base ones. Each segment corresponds to a month of the Baylonian calendar. For each month three stars are identified. These stars are ones which become visible just before dawn, having been previously invisible for a number of days - a phenomenon called Heliacal Rising.

The disk is further subdivided into three rings, the central ring is the northern sky, the middle ring is the central band of sky lying around the Celestial Equator, and the outer ring is the southern sky, as viewed from Babylon. These correspond to their concept of the Path of Anu, Path of Ea and Path of Enlil division of the sky into three bands.

It's clear from such 'Three Stars Each' Tablets and from the surviving Mul.Apin Tablets that the Baylonians had not as yet developed a Zodiac, which we would recognise today. In fact the Ecliptic itself didn't seem very important to them in comparison to the Celestial Equator: indicating that it was almost certainly not a concept familiar to them. The closest they had come to this concept before 539 BC was the Eighteen Stars of the Path of the Moon.

[The 'Three Stars Each' tablets are also called comfusingly known as Babylonian 'astrolabes' or 'planispheres'. In fact they didn't fulfill either function. An astrolabe is used to measure the height of a celestial body above the horizon, and the disks contained no information on planets.]

Click on the star map to see a larger version. 118 kB