Fifteen Eighty Four

When we look up into the night sky, we see stars and the few constellations that we can name, even occasionally a planet.  But at the same time, we know that with the aid of telescopes and astronomical interferometry we would see galaxies and nebulae, even “see” black holes, and this knowledge gives us our understanding of the enormity of the universe, our conception of the world. With a view to historical periods, however, knowledge of the universe and its phenomena varies as do ideas about how the world works. In Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity: An Anthropology of Science, I examine how the ancient scribes of Babylonia described their world and analyzed the behavior of the phenomena of interest to them, including phenomena of the heavens. Such descriptions and analyses are components of science, and science, therefore, is an important way of worldmaking.  The history of science in turn becomes a record of ways of worldmaking.  

The historical focus of this book is the very earliest of sciences found in the textual record of the Babylonian scribes who wrote in cuneiform. My project has three aims: first is to examine issues in how we have written the history of cuneiform science; second is to push modern methods in the history of cuneiform science into a new realm of ideas about the relationship of science to cultures and the interaction of the members of those cultures of science with their worlds; and third is to consider the reality of historical worlds and examine the one-world-many-worldviews position as against the notion of many actual worlds.

Because the relationship between world and worldmaking is surely one of the fundamentals of anthropological interest, the inquiry into the relationship a culture strikes with its own world constitutes an anthropology of science. The anthropological approach I propose here is not one achieved by ethnography, but rather by the analysis of historical texts.  By introducing an anthropology of science to Babylonia —to any of the premodern sciences —we introduce a cultural complement to existing methodologies of the history, sociology, and philosophy of science. 

Until the latter part of the last century, cuneiform knowledge was classified as science only when it was found to resemble or be comparable with Western scientific ideas and practices. Predictive astronomy was one such practice granted scientific status while other practices, such as divination and magic were not. What is at stake in Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity is not the question of how like or unlike later sciences the ancient traditions were. It is rather to advocate for a more culturally informed approach to writing the history of cuneiform sciences, an approach that takes a page from the field of anthropology, specifically from the attention paid in recent anthropological research into other ontologies (the things that exist in the world) and the very question of a plurality of worlds.

Once the world is conceived from the perspective of others, assuming that is achievable, the physical world of modern science no longer provides a reasonable standard by which to understand other orderings of reality, whether from ethnographical or historical sources. And because historical and ethnographical sources attest to a plurality of sciences practiced in accordance with many ways of worldmaking, their study can profit from all the methodological approaches we have at our disposal, that is, the history of science, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science, and, not least, the anthropology of science. While Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity focuses particularly on Babylonian cultures of science, in general its interest lies in how we write the history of science in light of the great diversity of ways of worldmaking across the historical and cultural landscape of science.