Salmeschiniaka

sal-mes-khi-nee-AH-kah

greek: Σαλμεσχινιακά (Salmeschiniaka)

Definition

The Salmeschiniaka is an early Egyptian-Hellenistic astrological treatise on the decans — the thirty-six ten-degree star-segments the Egyptians used to mark time. It survives only in fragments and in descriptions by later writers. Possibly composed around the third or second century BCE, it gave the decans their meanings according to where each one stood relative to the rising decan, the Hour-Marker. It is cited as a sample of the astrology the Egyptian priesthood practiced, and is widely regarded as one of the oldest decan-related astrological sources we have.

In Tradition

Scholars treat the Salmeschiniaka as a Greek-language write-up of older Egyptian decan-divination material, and as key evidence for how astrology first developed in Egypt. It is linked to the decans, the Hour-Markers, and the curing of diseases, and is often called the earliest Hermetic astrological treatise generally accepted as Egyptian. Brennan reads its angle-based decan meanings as an early ancestor of the later twelve-house system.

In Practice

You meet the Salmeschiniaka today as a reference point for tracing where ideas came from, not as a technique you would use. A student following the origins of decan doctrine and the angles uses it to see how pre-Hellenistic Egyptian practice tied predictions to the four angles — rising, culminating, setting, and anti-culminating points — before the twelve-place system formed. In Brennan's reconstruction the treatise gave each decan a topic by its position relative to the Hour-Marker: the first decan governed birth, the twenty-eighth (culminating early) livelihood, the twenty-fifth (culminating at noon) sickness, the nineteenth (rising late) injury, the seventeenth (setting in the west) marriage, the eighth (the door of Hades) children, and the subterranean decan death. To study it is to study the conceptual seed of reading the angles. Because the text survives only in fragments and second-hand reports, any modern engagement rests on the testimony of Hephaistio of Thebes, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, and on scholars piecing it together.

Historical Origin

The Salmeschiniaka survives only in fragments and descriptions. Hephaistio of Thebes quotes from it in his Apotelesmatika, and Porphyry and Iamblichus refer to it in connection with the first-century-CE Egyptian priest Chaeremon. Modern scholarship dates its underlying material to roughly the third century BCE or earlier — Brennan reconstructing its decan doctrine, Greenbaum surveying the Greek testimony, and Belmonte and Lull connecting it to the Naos of the Decades of Nectanebo I.

Etymology

Origin: Greek. Meaning: Title of an early decan treatise (etymology uncertain).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Etymology

Further Reading