-
T
or F? Only the king could
decree an adjustment to the Babylonian calendar.
-
T or F? The king relied upon his
astronomical scribes to advise him when an extra month was needed.
-
T or F? Mul Apin texts contained
information used by scribes to determine when an extra month was needed.
-
T or F? Scribes wrote only on
one side of cuneiform tablets.
-
T or F? Hammurabi ruled Babylon
in the first millennium BC.
-
T or F? Extra months, when needed,
were added at the beginning of the Babylonian year.
-
T or F? The Scribes of Enuma Anu
Enlil compiled astronomical observations for hundreds of years.
-
T or F? “Daily diaries” contained
guidelines for interpretion of astronomical events as omens foretelling
the fate of the king and empire.
-
T or F? In “Monthly summaries,”
scribes summarized the observations of the Moon and planets recorded in
the daily diaries.
-
T or F? In the series of Enuma
Anu Enlil tablets, scribes recorded observations of each night, including
the position of bright stars.
-
T or F? Titles of cuneiform texts
like “Enuma Anu Enlil” usually consist of the last two or three words of
the text.
-
T or F? Mul Apin tablets contain
rising and setting times for bright stars and constellations.
-
T or F? According to the Diviner’s
Manual, the Babylonian calendar consisted of 12 months and 360 days.
-
T or F? The Scribes of Enuma Anu
Enlil openly shared their knowledge of astronomy with foreigners and lay
people.
-
T or F? “Goal year” texts were
used to predict planetary positions based on their positions in similar
previous years.
-
T or F? The Plimpton 322 tablet
contains a sign for zero.
-
T or F? The far-left column of
the Plimpton 322 tablet numbers each row beginning with 1.
-
T or F? The headings of the second
and third columns of the Plimpton 322 tablet are words meaning “width” and
“diagonal.”
-
T or F? Neugebauer and Sachs argued
that the Plimpton 322 tablet contains part of a list of Pythagorean triples.
-
T or F? Bill Casselman argues
that the Plimpton 322 tablet suggests that the Babylonians knew how to generate
primitive Pythagorean triples.
-
T or F? A ziggurat was an underground
cave used as a royal tomb.
-
T or F? All known ziggurats in
Mesopotamia were built before 2000 BC.
-
T or F? The Temple of Esagila,
devoted to Marduk, was located in the center of Babylon near the Etemenanki.
-
T or F? The seventy tablets of
Enuma Anu Enlil typically contain astronomical observations, arranged day
by day, coupled with events thought to have been signified by the astronomical
omens.
-
T or F? One extant astronomical
diary recorded a total lunar eclipse and interpreted it as signifying the
defeat of king Darius by Alexander the Great in 331 BC.
-
T or F? Callisthenes, a Greek
astronomer who accompanied Alexander, had cuneiform texts translated and
sent back to Greece.
-
T or F? The period from one full
moon to the next full moon is called a sidereal month.
-
T or F? Kidinnu’s estimate of
the length of a synodic month is within a half a second of the modern value.
-
T or F? Kidinnu’s estimate of
the length of the solar year is within five minutes of the modern value.
-
T or F? Babylonian astronomers
in the era of Kidinnu could predict lunar eclipses.
-
T or F? A Greek astronomer named
Meton discovered that 235 lunar months are almost identical to 19 solar
years.
-
T or F? The Greek astronomer Callipus
of Cyzicus discovered a cycle of 76 years to reconcile solar and lunar calendars.
-
T or F? Babylonian astronomers
such as Kidinnu predicted the positions of the Moon using an arithmetical
system that took into account the Moon’s apparently non-uniform motion by
changing the Moon’s speed over time.
-
T or F? Kidinnu lived in the fourth
century BC.
-
T or F? System-B astronomical
methods were used by later Greek astronomers including Critodemus, Hipparchus
and Ptolemy.
-
T or F? According to an astronomical
diary, in Year 5 of Darius, the sixth month, a total lunar eclipse occurred
on the 13th day.
-
T or F? According to an astronomical
diary, in Year 5 of Darius, the sixth month, Darius’ soldiers deserted him
on the 24th day.
-
T or F? Most of the cuneiform
texts that survived antiquity were published in the 19th century.
-
T or F? If interpreted by the
omen literature of Enuma Anu Enlil, the astronomical observations of September
331 would signify that the king of Persia and Babylon would lose his throne
to a western enemy.
-
T or F? Berossus was a Babylonian
priest who wrote a history of Mesopotamia in Greek in the early 3rd century
BC.
A classic introduction
to ancient mathematical astronomy, including the System B method of Kidinnu,
is Otto
Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (1957; a reprint ed.
is still available from Dover Press).
