Consider This from NPR - Bad Omens Or The Cycle of Nature? How The Ancient World Viewed Eclipses

Episode Date: April 7, 2024

Tomorrow, the Great American Eclipse will sweep across North America, and millions will experience total darkness.It's an eerie and mysterious experience even though at this point, we know exactly what's happening: the moon passes in front of the sun, casting a shadow over earth. But imagine you lived in the ancient world, with no warning that an eclipse was about to happen, as the sun's disk suddenly disappeared and the day fell dark and cool. Unsurprisingly, eclipses were often seen as bad omens. That was true in Mesopotamia, the region that today includes Iraq, Syria, Kuwait and Turkey. But even then, ancient Mesopotamian astronomers were looking for other explanations.Watching an eclipse is one of humanity's oldest rituals, and it's been inspiration to scientists since the beginning of time. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Humans have been looking up at the stars for millennia, studying them and dreaming of reaching them. In the last century, we finally developed the technology to realize those dreams. Sputnik, the first satellite, launched into space in 1957. Just a few years later, in 1965, astronauts entered the vacuum of space on the first ever spacewalks. This is astronaut Ed White floating outside of the Gemini 4 spacecraft. Okay, I'm separating from the spacecraft. Okay, you're separating from the spacecraft. There's the satellite.

You look beautiful. I feel like a million dollars. And that same decade... Right, here we go. Pretty good little jump. That's one small step for man. Neil Armstrong left the first set of footprints on the moon. I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads and the fine sandy particles.

And as technology has advanced, we have sent satellites on interstellar missions. Voyager 1 was the fastest spacecraft ever launched, 32,481 miles an hour. Searched for other solar systems. Planet hunters have found somewhere around 100 planets outside our solar system. And rigged up rovers to map distant planets. We even know what it sounds like on Mars. And though technology has changed, one thing has been constant throughout human history, our fascination with the stars and our attempts to understand how it all works.

Consider this. Tomorrow, millions of people will look up as a total solar eclipse traces an arc across North America. It's one of humanity's oldest rituals and sciences, the study of how the solar system works. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Sunday, from NPR. Tomorrow, the great American eclipse will sweep across North America. Millions will experience total darkness. It is an eerie and mysterious experience, even though at this point we know exactly what is happening. The moon will be passing in front of the sun, casting a shadow over the earth. But imagine that you lived in the ancient world,

with no warning that an eclipse was going to happen, as the sun's disk suddenly disappeared and the day felt dark and cool. Unsurprisingly, in the ancient world, eclipses were often seen as bad omens. That was true in Mesopotamia, the region that today includes Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkey. But even then, ancient Mesopotamian astronomers were looking for other explanations. They kept detailed records of celestial movement. And the people of Mesopotamia, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, were the first to figure out that eclipses occur in cycles, meaning that it could be predicted. Eckhart Fromm is a professor of Assyriology at

Yale University and joins us now. Welcome to All Things Considered. Thank you for having me. Before we get to the science, can you give us some more specifics about how the average person would have reacted to an eclipse during this time period? I think very much like today in the ancient world and in ancient Mesopotamia, solar eclipses in particular were very big events that had a big impact on the collective psyche. That's probably the case in all sorts of other ancient civilizations as well. But in Mesopotamia, we actually have a lot of textual records because people wrote on clay. And we have those very tablets. And they talk about sightings of eclipses and what those eclipses meant for the people living at that time.

What specifically is in some of these records? Is it just, you know, an eclipse happened? Or is there documentation of what the sociological or what the societal response was? Yeah, so we have what we call omen texts. These are collections of entries of a type like if a solar eclipse happens in the first month of the year, the king will die, there will be famine. But we also have letters exchanged between the Assyrian kings of that time and the Ascending Kings were very much interested in astrology and had such scholars stationed all over the kingdom in different cities, observing the sky on a regular basis and writing to them on a daily basis, essentially. What can you tell us about how they were carrying out astronomy right now? How sophisticated was the understanding of what was happening in space and the position of the Earth to the Moon to the Sun during ancient Mesopotamian times?

Basically, they did not have telescopes, but they observed the sky. And even with your bare eye, when you look constantly at the sky and record everything that happens, you can find out a lot about the mechanics of the heavens. And what they did, especially in Babylonia, beginning in the 8th century up to the 1st century BCE, is essentially the longest research project of all times. They observed month by month what was happening. They recorded every eclipse, the movement of the moons, the planets, etc., correlated to some extent with events in history,

and thus, of course, had an enormous body of observed phenomena that then enabled them to establish these regularities. And that led to the refinement of mathematical astronomy during the last centuries before Christ in Mesopotamia. Something to be said for paying attention for a long period of time and taking good notes, I guess. Absolutely, and sort of long-term funding of science and scholarship, etc. The Greeks, by the way, drew on this research.

The famous Antikythera mechanism, an ancient computer from the Hellenistic period, actually has settings enabling the prediction of solar and lunar eclipses based on these Babylonian models, so it's all very sophisticated. Okay, so we've established that eclipses were bad omens, that there was a pretty negative psychological large-scale response to them, and

then through years and years and years of observation, they get an understanding of the cycles that these happens in. They get an understanding of the rhythms, these happens and they they get an understanding of the rhythms and they can predict them what were other ways that that kings and other leaders prepared for solar eclipses right so even though to some extent eclipses could be predicted there was still a great fear that they would bring misfortune especially especially to the state. The sun was the embodiment of the

state, especially of the king. The king was considered sun-like, which is not surprising. So it was believed that the solar eclipse predicted in particular misfortune for the state. The good news in a way is that there were some extenuating factors. For instance, when Jupiter was visible at the time of an eclipse and throughout the month, that meant that probably things were not quite as bad. And if Jupiter at least was still visible, things wouldn't be catastrophic. And for your listeners, it might be reassuring to know

that the eclipse that's coming up on April 8th, that during that eclipse, Jupiter should be visible and Jupiter is visible this month. So don't despair. There's still hope. So we're talking in the era of the, you know, the Webb Space Telescope, where we can see clear-cut evidence of black holes hundreds of thousands of light years away.

So obviously astronomy has come a very long way since this time period. But as you mentioned before, eclipses still have a hold on society. There's still an event that affects us that we all think about, that we all pay very close attention to. I mean, you've been studying ancient Mesopotamia for years and years. What do you think about any sort of parallels between how eclipses were thought of then and now? Yeah, I would say this is one of those cases where we are not that different from the people who lived thousands of years ago. As I mentioned, I mean, they were able to a certain extent to predict these eclipses too, and yet they were afraid. And even though, of course, I've studied

this, I know why this is happening, and that it is basically a mechanical thing. I still feel today this uncanniness that is associated with an eclipse, and it's such a powerful cosmic experience that I think whenever you live, wherever you are, however educated you are, it will leave an impression on you. What are your plans to watch the eclipse on Monday? Well, I wish I could go to somewhere where I could see the total eclipse, but unfortunately it's a Monday. I have to be here. So I am planning, of course, to look at it with the necessary protection. I'm also a little bit

worried. I mean, considering the state of the world right now, who knows what this all means, but with Jupiter, I'm not too pessimistic. At least Jupiter's there for us. Eckhart Fromm is a professor of Assyriology at Yale University. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, and happy Eclipse Day. This episode was produced by Avery Keatley. It was edited by Courtney Darning.

Our executive producer is Sammy Yannick. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.