Neugebauer’s Astronomical Cuneiform Texts, published in 1955, defined the field of Babylonian astronomy for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Astronomical Cuneiform Texts, or ACT as it is generally referred to, contains editions of more than three hundred cuneiform tablets dealing with mathematical astronomy, each accompanied by a detailed commentary. In addition, the book contains a historical investigation of the date and provenance of the tablets, the scribes mentioned in colophons, and an extensive mathematical introduction to the lunar and planetary schemes found on the tablets. In his review of ACT, the Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim wrote that he “can only pay homage in a few trite phrases to the amount of devotion, patience, and scholarship which has gone into this difficult work, to which the author dedicated twenty years of his life”, and that the book “ushers in the second phase in the development of our understanding of Babylonian astronomy”. This paper begins by tracing the history of ACT from its conception in Copenhagen during the mid-1930s to its publication two decades later by which time Neugebauer had crossed the Atlantic and was well established at Brown University. The second part of the paper discusses the reception of ACT among historians of science and Assyriologists and its impact upon the study of Babylonian astronomy.
...MoreBook Alexander Jones; Christine Proust; John M. Steele (2016) A Mathematician's Journeys: Otto Neugebauer and Modern Transformations of Ancient Science.
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