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Forecast For Babylonians

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Is ‘Celestial Forecasting’ a fair description of the activities of the Babylonians?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (n.d.), to forecast is “to calculate or predict (some future event or condition) usually as a result of study and analysis of available pertinent data”. This word appears multiple times when one is studying the origin of science, and more specifically, the involvement of the Babylonians. It’s of great importance to study their activities in order to give us an idea of the time in which science (as we know it) started. This essay will analyze the activities of the Babylonians and, at the same time, see if “Celestial Forecasting” is a fair description of them.
The Babylonians were not interested in knowing the underlying explanations as of why things behave as they do in the heavens, so they focused on making very accurate predictions (by extrapolating the data they recorded) and looking for signs …show more content…

39). The Babylonians are recognized for their very precise predictions of lunar eclipses. To predict them, they made observations of lunar eclipses throughout and extensive period of time and then used linear extrapolation to calculate when the next will take place. They became very good at it. However, their methods were purely computational, the evidence we have shows that they never really looked at the heavens in a theoretical frame of mind (Toulmin & Goodfield, 1999, p. 34). Their interest was to know when the next eclipse would take place and not why the eclipse is happening. Oppenheim (1978, p. 644) gives a very good representation of this: “(…) the order in planetary movements was discovered, this knowledge failed to suggest in Mesopotamia the concept of an orderly functioning cosmos.” While they knew about the movement of the heavens, they failed to look for

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