The Star Zodiac of Antiquity

Nick Kollerstrom

In the early third century AD, two zodiac systems converged.1 One was
the ancient star-zodiac derived from the constellations, while the other
was the tropical zodiac, with its beginning at 00 Aries firmly anchored to
the Vernal Point, the Sun’s position at the Spring Equinox. It will be
argued here that this latter, tropical, system had not, in the third century,
come to be accepted by astrologers, but that it was to gradually come into
use amongst astrologers as the earlier, sidereal system sank into a deep
oblivion, at least in the West, from which it did not re-emerge until
rediscovered late in the nineteenth century.
It remains far from easy to ascertain which were the primary reference
stars which defined the sidereal zodiac’s position, and there may have
been different views on this, amongst the several cultures that adopted
it.2 The term ‘sidereal’ derives from the Greek sidera, a star, and the
terms ‘sidereal’- and ‘star’- zodiac will here have the same meaning, as
alluding to a division of the ecliptic into twelve equal sectors. The term
‘zodiac’ will here be used in the sense of these twelve equal divisions of
the ecliptic, and will not allude to the unequal constellations that are, as
it were, behind the twelve signs.
The convergence of the two celestial wheels, tropical and sidereal,
meant that the Vernal Point was moving by precession from the sidereal
sign of Aries into Pisces, an event comparable to the expectations of
present-day astrologers of its movement into Aquarius. These two events,
one in the past and the other still in the future, are separated by a period
of twenty-one centuries, the interval for the Vernal Point’s movement
round thirty degrees against the stellar background. However. while most
histories of ancient astronomy move effortlessly from twelve unequal
constellations to the tropical zodiac of equal divisions, blurring the
distinctions between the two, it will be argued here that neither of these
two systems was used by Hellenistic or classical astrologers for their
celestial longitude positions, and that they used a third system, an
intermediate stage, namely a sidereal zodiac of equal-sized divisions
rather than unequal constellations. A historical perspective may be
helpful.

Nick Kollerstrom, ‘The Star Zodiac of Antiquity’, Culture and Cosmos,

Vol. 1 no 2, Autumn/Winter 1997, pp. 5-22.
 6 The Star Zodiac of Antiquity

Early Beginnings
Early Sumerian astronomical records show how the constellations were
perceived on or near to the ecliptic in relation to the Moon: seventeen or
eighteen of these were discovered,3 as listed in the seventh century BC
tablet, Mul Apin, which concluded,

These are the gods standing on the path of the moon, (the gods)
through whose sectors the moon passes every month and whom he
touches.4

The sequence began with Taurus and the Pleiades, ending with
Lu.hung.ga, the Sumerian equivalent of Aries.5 Some half a dozen of
these constellations had the same names as today (the Crab, Balance,
Bull, Lion, Scorpion and Goat-fish), though the images may have
differed. For example, ‘The Mesopotamian Bull-of-Heaven shared with
our Taurus the cluster Hyades as its head but in other respects it was
different’.6 Aries was originally the Hired Farm Labourer,7 and Aquarius
was The Giant. There was a Great Swallow (south-western Pisces plus
epsilon Pegasi) and a Lady of the Heavens (north-eastern Pisces plus the
central part of Andromeda),8 both of which constellations turned into
fishes. These became linked to form a single sign/constellation as the
zodiac came into existence.9 An early Greek name for Libra, Chelae,
meant ‘horn of a scorpion’, hinting at a much larger Scorpion.10
Few constellation-images are derived from the Chaldeans. However,
one fragment shows the Virgo constellation, with an upright figure
holding a sheaf of corn, and the star Spica nearby.11 Likewise in the
Denderah zodiac, of c.30 BC the sign Virgo is represented by an upright
Isis-type figure.12 There may be, shall we say, a lost story of how
Ptolemy’s Virgo-constellation came to be very large, no less than forty-
six degrees of the ecliptic, with the Virgin laid out on her back. It was
rather crucial to the definition of the star-zodiac that Spica was a
boundary star, whereas the horizontal Virgo has Spica in the middle. It
would seem to me (rightly or wrongly) that such a horizontal Virgo
rather implies that the Sidereal zodiac has been forgotten.
As early as the second millennium BC, the Sumerians had developed a
base-sixty (sexagesimal) number system, with a year containing 360 days
and a day divided into 360 parts, with twelve hours and thirty ‘minutes’
per hour.13 Their schematic year had twelve lunar months each of thirty

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 Nick Kollerstrom 7

days. Such base-sixty arithmetic is today remembered by our division of

an hour into minutes and seconds.
From the mid-sixth century BC the astrological/astronomical ‘Diaries’
record the first evidence for the zodiac: planetary ingresses in
‘theoretically calculated zodiacal signs as opposed to visible
constellations’.14 Thus, in the sixth century BC a twelve-fold ‘solar’ logic
starts to be stamped upon the hitherto irregular constellations of the
ecliptic. Pressure from this logic caused the rearrangement of
constellations which had been stable for at least the previous thousand
years. The large Leo constellation occupying more than one sign was
decapitated by its sign boundary, while several constellations perceived
around what we now call Pisces were fused into one.
There is one tablet from the fifth or sixth century BC showing a
calendar system of twelve months, with adjacent constellations, some
months having two constellations.15 Month II had the Pleiades and
Taurus, month III had Gemini and Orion, while the last month of the
tablet had Pegasus and Pisces. It does not seem clear whether the
constellation thereby associated with a month was that rising just before
dawn or whatever.16 This is the earliest twelve-fold list, and as such
notable for having the sequence from Aries to Pisces, i.e. the ‘beginning’
to its zodiac sequence appears the same as that in use today.
At the beginning of the fifth century, twelve equal ‘signs’ existed as
divisions of the ecliptic, mirroring a schematic year of twelve months
each of 30 days, whereby the Sun moved approximately one degree per
day. In the fourth century a further subdivision into thirty degree
intervals gives individual celestial longitudes to the stars.17 These things
were rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century, when tablets now
in the British Museum were unearthed from the banks of the Tigris and
their cuneiform script deciphered. Prior to this, for one and a half
millennia, the primal, star zodiac had been forgotten. It seems that only
much later on, in the mid-second century BC, did the idea of dividing a
circle into three hundred and sixty degrees first appear, in Greece.18
The Metonic cycle was first used in the fifth century BC for calendar
computations, first in Chaldea and then in Greece,19 whereby the twelve
lunar months were kept in step with the solar year through nineteen-year
intervals. Before this, the process of intercalation had been a quite
haphazard affair. The calendar acquired a structure linking months and
years, at the same historical moment as twelve equal signs became fixed
in the firmament.

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 8 The Star Zodiac of Antiquity

The Greek word κοσµοζ (Kosmos) originally meant ‘order’ or

‘adornment’, from which the word ‘cosmetic’ derives. Then, in or around
the fifth century BC, it came to acquire a more special meaning, as
applying to the ordering of things as a whole,20 this being in opposition to
the concept of ‘chaos’. Thus, the meaning of the word kosmos, of beauty
as discerned in the order and structure of the world, developed while the
zodiac was coming into being.

The Stellar Reference

In ancient lunar-planetary observational work, the star Pollux, though of
first magnitude, was traditionally not regarded as having quite the same
import as Aldebaran, Regulus, Spica and Antares, the four first-
magnitude stars occultable by the Moon. Such prominent markers
anchored the star-zodiac of antiquity. In the Babylonian division Spica
lay somewhere near the end of the sign Virgo. Van der Waerden’s
conclusion that it was positioned at 29° Virgo, ‘with a possible deviation
of 1° to either side’ gives a fair idea of the accuracy involved.21
In the 1940s, the Irish ‘siderealist’ astrologer Cyril Fagan averred that
Aldebaran had originally been positioned at the centre of Taurus, i.e. at
15° longitude, as the prime reference point for the zodiac,22 placing Spica
at 29° of Virgo. A reconstruction of the star zodiac on this basis is shown
in Figure 1. Several others have endorsed this view,23 and in the mid-
twentieth century a school of sidereal astrologers adopted this
reference.24
After Fagan had reached this view, a detailed study by Peter Huber, a
pupil of Neugebauer at Princeton, resolved the position of the Chaldean
zodiac against the stars, by comparing given longitudes, in tablets
dateable to the first and second centuries BC.25 This is the only such
study of a systematic nature, and his conclusion concurred within arc
minutes with the position advocated by Fagan a few years earlier. In
1958 Huber published the result of his investigation, inferring an overall
‘ayanamsa value,’ of 4°28′ for 100 BC (ayanamsa is the Indian term,
adopted by western astrologers, which defines the distance between the
vernal point and 00 Aries in the sidereal zodiac). He derived that value
using merely eleven star positions, expressing mean displacement of their
stellar longitudes from those of the modern ‘tropical’ longitude (i.e. with
respect to the Vernal Point), in that year. From his estimate of position, a
date is derivable, of around 221 AD, plus or minus about fifty years, for
when the

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 Nick Kollerstrom 9

Figure 1: The Sidereal Zodiac (Source: Robert Powell), with names of some
1st magnitude stars, plus movement of Vernal Point from 5th century BC
(Euctemon) and 2nd century AD (Ptolemy), to today at 25°.

two reference-systems, sidereal and tropical, coincided - a century after

Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos was written.
The position of the brightest zodiac star, Aldebaran, the ‘Bull’s Eye’,
was given by Huber as 10°34′ of Taurus for his epoch of 100 BC,26
which is 4°26′ short of the sign’s mid-point, i.e. 15° in the Babylonian
sign of the ‘Bull of Heaven’. That difference is a mere few arc minutes
from the mean displacement of the Chaldean zodiac which Huber
ascertained for that epoch. This suggests that Aldebaran, at 15° Taurus or
something close to it, was a prime reference.27 Taking a different view, a
recent British work considered that

‘This [Chaldean] sidereal zodiac appears to have been fixed so that the
longitude of the bright star β Gemini was 90°. Consequently, the

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 10 The Star Zodiac of Antiquity

equinoxes and solstices occurred at about 10° of their respective signs

in 500 BC’.28
It was not explained how such a view was derived, but it would put β
Gemini (Pollux) at the sidereal Gemini/Cancer boundary (alluded to
above as 90° in celestial longitude). This would differ by about a degree
and a half from the earlier-discussed reference, and leave Spica at 30° of
Virgo. No Chaldean tablets have been found which specify any rule for
placing the sign divisions. Table 1 shows the longitudes of several stars
which may be relevant, taking Aldebaran as 15°00’ of the sidereal sign of
Taurus for a reference.
There were thirty or so stars which appeared on texts after
approximately 300 BC, being the standard Babylonian reference stars for
defining lunar appulses (i.e. transits), and these included the above.
These, sometimes called Normal stars, are mostly, but not always, in the
same constellation as today, for example the ‘rear foot of the lion’ has
been identified as the star beta Virgo.29 However the above list of stars,
four of which are near to boundaries, all appear as in the same
constellation as today. Rotating the star-zodiac position to place Pollux at
the sign boundary, i.e. at 30°, would put other stars into the adjacent sign.
The stars in Table 1 give a position of the star zodiac within a degree or
so.

Table 1: Zodiacal longitudes 0-30° of some fixed stars, using a sidereal

reference with Aldebaran at 15°00´ of Taurus. Corrections of a few arc
minutes have been made for proper motion, for longitudes of 100 BC.

Sidereal longitude 100 BC

Aldebaran (Taurus) 15°00′
Antares (Scorpion) 15°00′
Regulus (Lion) 05°12′
Spica (Virgin) 29°06′
Boundary Stars
Alhecka (Taurus) 00°02′ Gemini
Pollux (Gemini) 28048′
Deneb (Capricorn) 28041′

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 Nick Kollerstrom 11

The Tropical Scheme

The tropical zodiac started life as a calendar, associated with the Greek
astronomer Euktemon in the fifth century BC. He located the date of the
summer solstice (from an observation at 431 BC), from which he
constructed a calendar of twelve solar months defined by the equal-
length signs: ‘The first day of the month “Cancer” was the day of the
summer solstice, the first day of “Libra” was the autumnal equinox, and
so on’.30 Other Greek mathematicians did not agree, and instead placed
the Vernal Point 8° away from zero Aries.31 The Greek astronomer
Hipparchus in the second century BC was the first to prepare a catalogue
of star longitudes, and he did so using the tropical zodiac, taking the
Vernal Point as zero Aries.
Much later on, in the first century AD, Pliny’s Historia Naturalis
placed the Vernal Point at 8° of Aries, and a century later the Roman
writer Vitruvius did likewise.32 It would appear that, in the first century
AD, these Romans were far from appreciating the phenomenon of
precession, but were picturing an immovable Vernal Point, one valid for
a much earlier epoch: eight degrees was fine for the fifth century BC, but
by Pliny’s time it was way out: his zodiac had slipped by five or six
degrees. One could say that Pliny was using a ‘tropical’ zodiac, insofar
as his Vernal Point had a fixed celestial longitude. Hipparchus had
described the phenomenon of precession, but this notion was far from
being generally accepted. He may have taken zero Aries as the Vernal
point, but if so this had not made much headway (Hipparchus did not use
celestial longitude for positions but instead an oblique or right
ascension).

Greek Horoscopes
Otto Neugebauer’s compilation, Greek Horoscopes, gives planetary
longitudes of the earliest remaining Greek horoscopes, plus dates,
spanning the first to the fifth centuries AD.33 Neugebauer remarked that
the charts in this volume were sidereal, i.e. they used a similar reference
to the Babylonian zodiac.34 It seemed to me that he was neither well able
to show this nor to reach a conclusion concerning what zodiac
framework was in use in these charts, since computing these things was
harder in his day. About one-fifth of the charts in Greek Horoscopes
book were cast for reliably known times and have zodiac longitudes
specified for the planets (Table 2).35 Using these, their ayanamsas were
plotted against the year of their composition, to give a graph (Figure. 2).

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 12 The Star Zodiac of Antiquity

Mercury positions were omitted, as these tend to be less reliable. For

the other five planetary longitudes given (Sun, Moon, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter and Saturn), a subtraction was made of the (tropical) longitude
computed for that date and time, from that written on the horoscope. Any
obviously erroneous values were omitted (taken as having difference
values over twice the standard deviation of the group, for a chart). Then,
the average difference value for the chart, i.e. the mean of the five
difference values, was found. These difference values give an estimate of
the ayanamsa. It can be seen that, in the group of charts for the first and
second centuries AD, the longitude values used by the astrologers appear
as greater than the corresponding tropical-zodiac positions, while, some
centuries later, the last batch of charts in the fifth century gives a result
the other way round.

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 Nick Kollerstrom 13

Two possible zodiac positions are shown as straight lines in Figure 2.

The slope of each line corresponds to the rate of precession, viz. one
degree per seventy-two years. The lower line corresponds to the star
Aldebaran being placed at 15° of Taurus (and thus Spica at
approximately 29° of the Virgin). This position does not well fit the data.
The line above it shows the ayanamsa values that come from putting
Spica at 30° of Virgo, i.e. on the Virgo/Libra boundary. This gives a
better fit through the data. We may also compare the zodiac framework
used by Babylonian horoscopes with the ‘Greek’ i.e. Hellenistic
horoscopes surveyed above. A forthcoming survey has collated in total
twenty-eight such Chaldean horoscope tablets.36 Eight of these used
degree longitudes to some extent, and five had sufficient to apply the
above procedure for planetary longitude values. These five charts
spanned 235 BC to 69 BC.

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14 The Star Zodiac of Antiquity

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 Nick Kollerstrom 15

Figure 3 shows the same ‘Greek Horoscope’ data as before, but with
only one ‘theoretical’ line of zodiac position for the star Spica at 30° of
the Virgin, and with a mean ayanamsa value computed by Huber for 100
BC inserted as a point, the ‘Huber point’, and the five Babylonian chart
ayanamsa values have been added. This graph suggests that a single
frame of reference for the sidereal zodiac was used by both Babylonian
and Greek astrologers, enduring over eight centuries, before being
forgotten in the Dark Ages. The data here presented does seem to support
the above-quoted claim of Walker and Britton concerning ß Gemini (note
28), both for Greek (or, rather, Hellenistic) charts as well as Babylonian.
The charts dating from the first century have their planets 3-4° from
the positions expected using a tropical system, i.e. an ayanamsa of 3-4°.
There are a dozen or so such charts dated to the latter half of the fifth
century, by which time the two wheels had crossed over and moved some
two degrees apart.37 These charts show that even in the centuries after
Ptolemy, the astrologers writing in Greek continued to use a sidereal
reference. The charts are mainly from Alexandria, indicating that even in
Ptolemy’s city the sidereal tradition endured.
Confirmation of this view comes from Egyptian astronomical tables of
the first century AD that would have been consulted by astrologers.38
They specify dates of entry of the planets into the signs of the zodiac. On
average, Neugebauer found that about four degrees had to be added to
their given longitudes to obtain modern (i.e. tropical) longitudes. As the
graph showed, this is just what would be expected from the sidereal
reference. Van der Waerden concluded ‘the Egyptian mathematicians
worked on the basis of a sidereal division of the ecliptic which almost
coincided with the Babylonian division’.39
This thesis is supported by the recent work of Alexander Jones, as an
explanation of how astronomical theory in Roman Egypt in the early
centuries AD in large part evolved from the predictive methods known to
us from Babylonian tablets of the last four centuries BC.40 Jones
concluded that ‘...it is now clear that practically the whole of Babylonian
planetary theory was current knowledge in Roman Egypt, well after the
publication of Ptolemy’s writings and tables’.41 This helps us to
appreciate how Alexandrian astrologers of the period continued to use a
Babylonian zodiacal framework.
These results, though admittedly from a small sample,42 suggest that
ancient astrology remained sidereal. Greeks who used the Tropical
reference, such as Euctemon and Hipparchus, are remembered primarily

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 16 The Star Zodiac of Antiquity

as astronomers,43 concerned with such matters as calendars and star

positions. There were various zodiac frameworks in antiquity, tropical
and sidereal, but the evidence from surviving horoscopes clearly
indicates that the latter type was used by astrologers, a fact glossed over
by histories of astrology and astronomy.44 These results are compatible
with the view associated with Cyril Fagan, that it was not until several
centuries after Ptolemy, around the 5th-6th centuries, that astrologers
started to use a tropical zodiac.45

Ptolemy’s View
Ptolemy utilised a tropical reference framework for the zodiac in his
Tetrabiblos, i.e. for astrology, and is the first on record as having done
this.46 In his lifetime, the two wheels were only one degree apart. Using
Hipparchus’ star positions for his Almagest, he likewise advocated the
same reference point as Hipparchus, viz. zero Aries. Thereby he unlinked
the zodiac from its stellar framework and reconnected it to the four
seasons. Janus-like, he could face both ways because he lived around the
one period when the two wheels coincided. His zodiac was firmly
constellational, and also firmly Sun-based. Did Ptolemy realise that the
two systems were only together at one point in historical time - his life
time? I doubt it.
However, although anchored to the seasons of the year by its celestial
reference points, Ptolemy’s zodiac remained sidereal in its astrological
character. In the section in Tetrabiblos entitled ‘Of the Nature of Signs,
and their Effect upon the Weather’ he alludes to the individual stars
which comprise the Zodiac images: the effect of the sign Aries varied
from one end to the other ‘due to the special quality of the fixed stars’.
The sign of Taurus had a ‘leading portion, particularly near the Pleiades’,
together with ‘its following portion near the Hyades’.47 An earlier
section, ‘Of the Power of the Fixed Stars’, describes how zodiacal stars
operate, e.g. Antares in the ‘body of Scorpio’ is said to be Mars-like,
though it is left unstated whether he is describing the twelve
constellations, or signs. The same section describes the influence of
various extra-zodiacal constellations on human beings.
Before Ptolemy, there were two traditions, of which that from Chaldea
was astrological, while that in Greece was astronomical. These traditions
fused in the melting-pot of Alexandria, where western astrology as we
know it was born, after which the sidereal tradition faded away and a
new

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 Nick Kollerstrom 17

tropical tradition appeared, as if the astral images of the constellations

had somehow become precipitated onto the ecliptic plane, to make a Sun-
defined zodiac.
As the Vernal Point moved into Pisces, and the two systems coincided,
the image of a fish came to be widely accepted as a symbol for the new
Christian religion. The fish symbol first appeared in this context in
Alexandria, at the beginning of the second century, and became ‘current
by the end of the second century’. This celestial transition was, it has
recently been argued, a main reason for the early adoption of the
Christian religion by the Egyptians, using the new religious symbol of a
fish.48 By the end of the third century, the Autumn Equinox had come
into conjunction with the star Spica, making the Libra/Virgo boundary
opposite the First Point of Aries appear as the start of the zodiac.49
The astrologers of the Muslim world took Ptolemy’s two books as
their chief link with past tradition, and so their zodiac was tropical, as
Fagan argued.50 Ptolemy’s fixing of the start of the zodiac at the
equinoctial point, a position in space defined by a point in time of the
year’s cycle, became henceforth the only zodiac they knew about. Thus
the star zodiac vanished from the West while Indian astrologers followed
the earlier tradition: ‘In its original form the zodiac in India was probably
the Zodiac used by Greek astrologers, which, owing to the spread of
astrology, became transmitted to India in the 2nd century A.D’.51 Indian
astrologers do not admit that their zodiac was so derived, believing in the
immemorial antiquity of Hindu culture. However, they now use a star-
based zodiac (the ‘Lahiri’ ayanamsa) with Spica at 30° of Virgo, which
would appear to be the very same as was used throughout the Hellenistic
world.52
It has here been argued that astrologers of the ancient world measured
longitudes using a sidereal reference. We found no evidence that they
used a tropical reference for their horoscopes. A coherent sidereal
framework existed over at least eight centuries, though one is not sure
exactly how this was fixed, if indeed there was one such definition.
Respect for the Chaldeans, who invented horoscopic astrology, was such
that the tradition endured, so long as this origin was remembered.

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 18 The Star Zodiac of Antiquity

References

1. Otto Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, II, 1975,

pp.593-4.

2. Rupert Gleadow, The Origin of the Zodiac 1968 p.28; W.M. O’Neill, Early
Astronomy (Sidney U.P.1986), p.26. John Britton and Christopher Walker,
‘Astronomy and Astrology in Mesopotamia’ in Astronomy Before the Telescope,
Ed. Christopher Walker (London 1996), Marie Delclos, Astrologie Racines
Secretes et Sacres (Paris 1994), Ch. 17. A source problem is the absence of
statements from Hellenistic astrologers themselves as to whether their zodiac was
genuinely sidereal, i.e., tied to the stars, or fixed to a starting point which may not
have been the vernal point, such as 80 or 100 and was therefore in effect tropical.
This problem is discussed by Robert Hand in his introduction to Vettius Valens,
The Anthology, Book 1, Golden Hind Press, PO Box 002, Berkeley Springs,
WV, 1993, p iii. The tale of the sidereal zodiac’s rediscovery has been well
described in From The Omens of Babylon by Michael Baigent (London, 1994),
but without comment either on the zodiac signs or the position of zodiac
divisions in relation to the stars.

3. Britton and Walker, op. cit. (2), p.49: ‘17 sometimes interpreted as 18’;
Gleadow op. cit., p.163, ‘The Eighteen Signs’; Jim Tester, A History of Western
Astrology, 1987, p.14; F.Rochberg-Halton, ‘New Evidence for the History of
Astrology’, Journal of Near-Eastern Studies, 43,1984, pp.115-127, 122.

4. Christopher Walker, ‘A Sketch of the Development of Mesopotamian

Astrology and Horoscopes’, Clio and Urania Confer, Ed Kitson,1989, pp.7-14,
9.

5. B.L.van der Waerden, Science Awakening II, The Birth of Astronomy (Leyden
and New York 1974), p.80.

6. O’Neil, op. cit, p.17 (diagram of early Taurus constellation).

7. A.E Thierens, Astrology in Mesopotamian Culture (Leiden 1935), p 51,

translates this as ‘agricultural labourer’.

8. Owen Gingerich, ‘Astronomical Scrapbook: The Origin of the Zodiac’ Sky &
Telescope 1984, 67, 218-20, in Gingerich, The Great Copernicus Chase 1992
Ch.2.

9. Van der Waerden, op. cit., p.72.

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 Nick Kollerstrom 19

10. Alex Gurshtein, ‘The Real Zodiac’, Sky & Telescope 1995, p.31-3, 32.

11. Robert Eisler, The Royal Art of Astrology, 1946, pp.97,99; Van der Waerden,
op. cit., p.81.

12. Van der Waerden, op. cit., p.123. The Denderah zodiac may not have been a
faithful depiction of constellation images, e.g. it depicted the whole Bull-of-
Heaven, whereas only the front portion existed as a constellation: thus, the rear
portion of Taurus depicted at Denderah may not ever have ‘existed’ i.e. have
been perceived in the sky.

13. George Sarton, A History of Science I, Harvard University Press, 1953, p.72;
John North, The Fontana History of Astronomy and Cosmology, 1994, p.21.

14. Walker, op. cit., p.11.

15. Britton and Walker op. cit., p.49.

16. Hugh Thurston, Ancient Astronomy (New York 1994), p.71: ‘No Babylonian
tablets deal directly with the sun. We have to deduce the Babylonian theory of
the sun’s motion from details on the tablets dealing with the moon’. Thurston
cites a Full-Moon tablet from the second century BC, with twelve months starting
with Nisan in the spring, and twelve signs of the corresponding Full moon,
starting with their equivalent of Scorpio.

17. Abraham Sachs, ‘A Late Babylonian Star Catalogue’ Journal of Cuneiform

Studies 1952, 6, pp.146-50 gave star longitudes in degrees over Virgo and Leo
(e.g. Spica 28° Virgo), dated to the fourth century.

18. North, op. cit., p.40.

19. The Metonic cycle originated ‘at best in the beginning of the 5th century, or
perhaps even later’. Neugebauer, Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 1940, 2, p.220.

20. Liba Chaia Taub, Ptolemy’s Universe, Illinois, 1993, p.139.

21. B.L. Van der Waerden, ‘History of the Zodiac’, Archiv fur Orientforschung,
1953, 16, pp.216-230, p.222.

22. Cyril Fagan, Zodiacs Old and New, 1951, p.18.

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 20 The Star Zodiac of Antiquity

23. Rupert Gleadow, op. cit.,p.28; Robert Powell and Peter Treadgold, The
Sidereal Zodiac, 1978, 1985, AFA; R .Powell, The Zodiac: A Historical Survey
ACS San Diego (no date) 16 pp; Marie Delclos, Astrologie Racine, cites the
primal markers as having been Aldebaran and Antares as 15° ‘exactement’ of
Scorpio/Taurus, Regulus as 5° Leo, Spica at 29°, also Formalhaut and the
Pleiades (Ch. 17).

24. Neil Michelson’s The American Sidereal Ephemeris 1976-2000, Astro

Computing Services, CA, 1980, gave Aldebaran as 15°03’ Taurus and Antares as
15°01’ of Scorpio.

25. Peter Huber, ‘Ueber den Nullpunkt der Babylonischen Ekliptic’ Centaurus
1958, 5, pp.192-208.

26. Huber, op. cit., p.205.

27. The two first-magnitude zodiacal stars Antares and Aldebaran were 180°
apart to within a single arcminute over the period 300 BC to 1200 AD: Dennis
Rawlins has computed that although these two may ‘never be seen
simultaneously in the Mediterranean area’, on some days each year they could be
seen together from below the Tropic of Capricorn, Dio, April 1992 p.15 (an
independent history of astronomy journal, Ed. Rawlins, US).

28. Britton and Walker, op. cit., p.49.

29. A.Sachs in D.G.Kendall et. al. Ed., The Place of Astronomy in the Ancient
World, OUP 1974, p.46. Sachs gave both the modern classification and the old
name, e.g. gir ar sa A (rear foot of the lion) and beta Virgo (translation by
Christopher Walker).

30. Van der Waerden, op.cit. (note 5) p.289.

31. This ayanamsa is associated with Eudoxus and Meton in the 4th century: Van
der Waerden, Science Awakening, p.290, ‘History of the Zodiac’, p.228.

32. Vitruvius, De Architectura Ch.9,3; Pliny Historia Naturalis XVIII Ch.59,

p.221; Otto Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy II 1975
p.594; Gleadow called this the Hellenistic Zodiac, claiming that it was used ‘by
Manetho and the Michigan Papyrus’, and that it had been ‘correct about 373
B.C’ op. cit.(note 2), p.75.

33. Neugebauer and van Hoesen, Greek Horoscopes (Philadelphia 1959, 1987),
p.594: there existed a 5° deviation between modern (i.e. tropical) longitudes and

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 Nick Kollerstrom 21

longitudes given in Greek horoscopes. In other words the astrological literature

of the hellenistic-Roman period still preserves the norm of Babylonian
astronomy’. (N.B., the authors of the horoscopes in this collection were probably
non-Greek Hellenised Syrians or Egyptians, and in some respects it could be
misleading to describe such horoscopes as ‘Greek’.)

34. Neugebauer, Greek Horoscopes, p.172: ‘Longitudes in Vettius Valens are

sidereal longitudes whereas the later authors operate with tropical longitudes,
obviously following the norm adopted by Ptolemy and Theon’.

35. Many of the charts in Greek Horoscopes are from Vettius Valens, however
only two of the 22 charts here used were by him, as the rest of his collection did
not give degree longitudes.

36. Francesca Rochberg, ‘Babylonian Horoscopy: The Texts and their Relations’,
Dibner Institute Proceedings, N.Swerdlow, Ed., U. Chicago Press, forthcoming,
pp.1-27 (I am grateful for permission to cite horoscopes from this text);
Francesca Rochberg-Halton, ‘Babylonian Horoscopes and their Sources’,
Orientalia, Vol 58 - Fasc 1 - 1989.

37. In Figure 2, seven charts shown from AD 40-140 have a mean ayanamsa of
3.7±1.4°, while for a group of eleven charts AD 460-500 the equivalent was
2.0±0.4°.

38. Van der Waerden, op. cit. (note 5), p.308; Neugebauer & Parker, Egyptian
Astronomical Texts, 1969.

39. Ibid., p.309.

40. Alexander Jones, ‘Studies in the Astronomy of the Roman Period’, Centaurus
1997, 39 1-36, 2.

41. Alexander Jones, ‘Babylonian Astronomy and its Legacy’, Bulletin of the
Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies, 1997, 32, pp. 11-16, 16.

42. Donata Baccani, Oroscopi Greci: Documentazione Papirologica (Ricerca

papirologica 1; Sicania, Messina 1992), contains a further collection of Egyptian
papyrus horoscopes. A further seventy charts are due to be published by
Alexander Jones (Toronto) in his forthcoming Astronomical papyri from
Oxyrhynchus.
43. It has been claimed that Hipparchus had a ‘pivotal role’ in ‘introducing
Babylonian Astronomy to the Greeks’, as ‘an advocate of astrology’:
G.J.Toomer, ‘Hipparchus and Babylonian Astronomy’, A Scientific Humanist:

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 22 The Star Zodiac of Antiquity

studies in memory of Abraham Sachs Ed. Leichty & Ellis, 1988, p.357. Toomer
has not substantiated this claim.

44. Ancient Astrology by Tamsyn Barton (London, 1994) defined the zodiac by
reference to the Vernal Point as zero Aries (p.88), thereby conveying the
erroneous view that ancient astrology was tropical. Two erudite books have of
late appeared both entitled Early Astronomy, neither giving any hint to their
readers that there once existed a sidereal zodiac. O’Neill, Early Astronomy, p 25-
6 (see note 2) gives a fine coverage of Babylonian astronomy, though without
alluding to their reference for measuring celestial longitude. Thurston, Early
Astronomy, p 68 (see note 16), does ask the question, ‘Where precisely on the
ecliptic were the signs placed?’ but answers in tropical terms, with the solstices
fixed at some degree of their signs, either 8° or 10°. Alex Gurshtein, op. cit. (9);
‘On the Origin of the zodiacal Constellations’ Vistas in Astronomy, 1993, 36, pp.
171-190, jumps straight from the twelve constellations into ‘the traditional
zodiac’ established by the fifth century BC, i.e. the tropical, as does Owen
Gingerich in ‘The Origin of the Zodiac’, Sky & Telescope 67, 218-20, in
Gingerich, The Great Copernicus Chase, 1992, Ch.2.

45. Fagan, op. cit., p.29.

46. John North, The Fontana History of Astronomy and Cosmology, 1994, writes
that Ptolemy ‘introduced’ the tropical zodiac, p.67.

47. Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Loeb Classical Library, 1940, pp.201-203.

48. Martin Bernal, Black Athena (London 1991), p.131; New Catholic
Encyclopaedia 1967, section on Pisces.

49. Duncan Mac Naughton, A Scheme of Egyptian Chronology, London 1932, p

173: ‘The zodiac was measured from Spica’.

50. Nicholas Campion, An Introduction to the History of Astrology, 1989, p.29:

first Arabic horoscope AD 531; Fagan, ref. (note 22), p.29.

51. Powell and Treadgold, op.cit.(note 23), p.17.

52. Spica will be at 23°48’ of Libra (tropical) in AD 2000. This will therefore be
the ‘ayanamsa’ of the Indian ‘Lahiri’ system for that epoch.

Culture and Cosmos