MUL.APIN

Definition

MUL.APIN is a cuneiform astronomical handbook on two tablets, named after its opening words (Sumerian mulAPIN, "the Plough Star"). It was composed before the end of the 8th century BCE, and surviving copies span the 8th to the 1st century BCE. It gathers star-lists in the three celestial paths of Enlil, Anu, and Ea; heliacal-rising dates in a schematic 360-day calendar; the ziqpu (culminating) stars; the Moon's path; Sun and day-length schemes; the planets' cycles; a calendar-alignment rule; shadow tables; and a short set of celestial omens.

In Tradition

Scholars call MUL.APIN the most widely copied astronomical handbook of ancient Mesopotamia (Hunger and Steele 2019, p. 11), with the sky-watching behind it reaching into the second millennium BCE. Rochberg, Hunger-Pingree, and Koch-Westenholz all treat it as the standard reference work from the era before mathematical astronomy — the text that set down the Three-Paths picture of the sky and the schematic-calendar framework that the later mathematical ACT corpus and the mid-first-millennium zodiac would extend.

In Practice

A Babylonian scribal-scholar (ummanu) turned to MUL.APIN as the authority on several things at once: the schematic 360-day calendar and how to keep it on track, the standard dates the principal stars first become visible, which of the three paths each named constellation belonged to, and the ziqpu stars used to tell the hours of the night by watching what crossed the meridian. Its calendar rule worked by comparing a star's observed first appearance with its scheduled date — and that comparison decided when to insert a thirteenth month. Its water-clock tables for the length of the night, whose values double across the rings of the Path of Ea, the Path of Anu, and the Path of Enlil, are the earliest known schematic model of how day-length shifts with the seasons. Its calendar and its Three-Paths scheme passed into later cuneiform astronomy and, indirectly, into Greek star-mapping.

Historical Origin

MUL.APIN was composed before the end of the 8th century BCE, and surviving copies span the late Neo-Assyrian period (8th-7th century BCE) through the Seleucid period (3rd-1st century BCE). The first complete critical edition was Hunger and Pingree, *MUL.APIN: An Astronomical Compendium in Cuneiform*, AfO Beiheft 24 (1989). It has been superseded by the Hunger and Steele 2019 critical edition (Routledge), which adds fragments found since 1989 (Horowitz 1989-1990; Fincke 2014, 2017; Hätinen forthcoming) while keeping the 1989 Tablet I / Tablet II line-numbering.

Further Reading

• Hermann Hunger & John Steele, The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN
• Hermann Hunger & David Pingree, Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia
• Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture