manzāzu (KI.GUB)

Definition

Manzāzu (Akkadian; written with the Sumerian sign KI.GUB) is the Babylonian word for a celestial body's station, or standing-place — the spot a planet, the Moon, or a star holds in the sky at the moment it is observed, or the position a procedure text assigns it. The word does double duty: it covers the steady sense, "the planet stands in its manzāzu," and the moving sense, "the planet keeps changing its manzāzu (manzāssu uš-tan-ni)," which is kept for the planets you can watch wander.

In Tradition

Hunger and Pingree treat manzāzu as the foundational positional idea of Babylonian observational astronomy — the word that grounds the Reports and Letters whenever they describe where Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Mars, the Sun, and the Moon stand on a given night. Hunger-Steele identify manzāzu (read as NA in MUL.APIN, following Sachs-Hunger 1988) as the term anchoring the planetary-station passages at I i 38 and I ii 13-15.

In Practice

Babylonian scholars used manzāzu both to describe and to theorise. Letter 100 reports that "Jupiter retained its position (KI.GUB)"; Report 27 reads "if Venus stays in her position (manzāzu) for long"; Report 297, by Nabû-iqīša, reads "if the Sun stands in the manzāzu of the Moon." In MUL.APIN the set phrase "manzāssu uš-tan-ni / KI.GUB-su KÚR.KÚR-ir" — "keeps changing its standing-place" — is reserved for the four planets other than Mercury, capturing the observed difference between the steadiness of the fixed stars and the wandering of the planets. The cosmological precedent comes from Enūma Eliš V 6, where the god Marduk fixes the star Nēberu in its manzāzu to anchor the spacing of the stars. Modern positional astronomy treats manzāzu as the Babylonian ancestor of the ideas of position and station that pass into the later Greek and Latin technical vocabulary.

Historical Origin

Manzāzu is attested in cuneiform from MUL.APIN (composed around 1000 BCE) through the Neo-Assyrian Sargonid Reports and Letters (SAA 8 and SAA 10, seventh century BCE) and on into the Late Babylonian astronomical corpus; its cosmological use appears in Enūma Eliš V 6. Modern critical treatments: Hunger-Pingree, *Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia* (1999); Hunger-Steele, *The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN* (2019); Sachs-Hunger, *Astronomical Diaries* (1988); Hunger, SAA 8 (1992).

Further Reading

• Hermann Hunger & David Pingree, Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia
• Hermann Hunger & John Steele, The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN
• Hermann Hunger, Astrological Reports to Assyrian Kings (SAA 8)