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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > November/December 2000

Origins: The Horoscope Casters

The ancient Mesopotamians were the first to ask, “What’s your sign?”

By Alexander Jones

For the Greeks and Romans of the first century B.C., the term “Chaldean” had two meanings: It was the name of the inhabitants of Chaldea, a district of southern Babylonia, and it was the title given to professional diviners who used the heavens to predict the future. This second group got its name from the popular belief that horoscope casting was invented in ancient Mesopotamia. Although traditions of divination often appeal to ancient authorities for credibility, the Chaldean origins of astrology are no fiction. Since the 1880s about 30 ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets containing horoscopes have surfaced. The majority […]

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Footnotes

1.

A handful of horoscopes from Uruk suggest that there may have been a different routine there, drawing not on records of observation but on calculations based on mathematical theories of the motions of heavenly bodies.