MUL.LÚ.HUN.GÁ (Aries)
mool loo HOON gah
babylonian: MUL.LÚ.HUN.GÁ
Definition
MUL.LÚ.ḪUN.GÁ is the Babylonian cuneiform name of a constellation — in Akkadian agru or lu-ḫun-ga, "the Hired Man" or "Hireling" — and it is the forerunner of the Greek sign Aries. It stands at the end of the Path of the Moon, the canonical list of 17 or 18 constellations in MUL.APIN Tablet I iv 33-37, and it became the first sign of the twelve equal signs standardised in Babylonia around 400 BCE.
In Tradition
Assyriologists treat the Hired Man as the ancestor — in both name and image — of the Greek Krios (Aries). Hunger and Steele keep "the Hired Man" in their MUL.APIN translation. Koch-Westenholz notes that when the picture used for the later Babylonian sign (the ram on the lumāšu-tablets) drifts away from the literal meaning of the constellation's name, it tends to land on the Greco-Roman picture instead — a sign that the Babylonian and Hellenistic worlds shared one common zodiacal vocabulary.
In Practice
In Babylonian sky-divination the Hired Man turns up in the MUL.APIN star catalogues, in the goal-year texts, and in the per-sign omens of the late Enūma Anu Enlil tradition; in mathematical astronomy it is one of the twelve equal 30° slices of the ecliptic used for System A and System B planetary calculation. If you want to trace how zodiac names crossed directly from Babylon into Greek astrology, this is the showcase example: the Hellenistic translators rendered lú.ḫun.gá as Krios and gave it the ram-symbol already found on the Seleucid lumāšu-tablets — opening the unbroken chain that runs through Hipparchus, Ptolemy, the Arabic transmission, and into the Western astrology used today.
Historical Origin
It is attested in MUL.APIN Tablet I iv 33-37 (compiled around 1000 BCE; the canonical Neo-Assyrian copies date to the 7th century BCE) as the last constellation of the Path of the Moon. The twelve-equal-sign zodiac with lú.ḫun.gá as the first sign is attested by 410 BCE, and VAT 4924 (the Diary for -418) preserves the earliest zodiac-sign reference. Editions: Hunger & Steele, *MUL.APIN*; Koch-Westenholz, *Mesopotamian Astrology* (1995).
Further Reading
- Hermann Hunger & John Steele, The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN
- Ulla Koch-Westenholz, Mesopotamian Astrology
- Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture