Ancient knowledge transfer: Egyptian astronomy, Babylonian methods
Oxford Arts Blog
5 Jun 2018
Adapted from an article by Exzellenzcluster Topoi.
Egyptian astronomers computed the position of the planet Mercury using methods originating from Babylonia, finds a study of two Egyptian instructional texts from Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. The study was carried out by Mathieu Ossendrijver, a historian of ancient science at Humboldt University Berlin and Exzellenzcluster Topoi, and Andreas Winkler, an Egyptologist at Oxford University's Faculty of Oriental Studies. The instructional texts date to 1-50 AD and are written in the Demotic language, a late stage of ancient Egyptian, on two 'ostraca' (potsherds, or broken pieces of ceramic material). They are the only known texts from Greco-Roman Egypt with instructions for computing astronomical phenomena with Babylonian methods.
http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/ancient-knowledge-transfer-egyptian-astronomy-babylonian-methods
