The place of theory in Babylonian astral science

Babylonian astral science of the 1st millennium BC was a multi-faceted practice including detailed and systematic astronomical observation, the development and use of various computational methods for predicting the positions and phenomena of the sun, moon, and planets, descriptions using simple numerical schemes of regular changes in the celestial realm, and various forms of astrology. Despite the detailed study of these practices over the past 150 years or so, historians of science remain divided as to whether Babylonian astronomy should be classified as a ‘science’. Specialists of Babylonian astronomy and astrology uniformly agree that it is science, whereas some non-specialists argue that science is a uniquely Greek invention. Much of this disagreement comes down to the question of whether Babylonian astral science is ‘theoretical’ or (merely) the fitting of numbers to empirical data. In this paper, I explore whether we can identify ‘theories’ within Babylonian astral science and if so where these are to be found.