Word: babylonia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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History was well along before it occurred to anybody that there were two ways of looking at war. War was war -bloody, awful, sometimes glorious-and the normal way in which a nation established itself in the days when Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and Persia were harrying each other for territory and tribute. Aggression invariably had the sanction of a deity. The Israelites' takeover of the Canaanites was commanded by Jehovah himself. And wars were usually as total as soldiers with limited technology could make them...
...does seem certain that the earliest humans were religious. Believing the cosmos to be governed by some divine power, they worshiped every manifestation of it: trees, animals, earth and sky. To the more sophisticated societies of the ancient world, cosmological mystery was proof that there were many gods. Ancient Babylonia, for example, worshiped at least 700 deities. Yet even those who ranked highest in the divine hierarchies were hardly more than invisible supermen. The Zeus of ancient Greece, although supreme on Olympus, was himself subject to the whims of fate?and besides that was so afflicted by fits of lust...
Pingree, sitting on a small pile of the books which take up most of the space in his room, outlined the history of reading the future in the stars. This pseudo-science, he explained, began about 4,000 years ago in Babylonia, where it was used to predict such things as floods, wars, famine, and the fates of kings. Eventually astrology reached Greece and India, and later began to flourish in Egypt. Around 300 B.C. complicated systems of epicycles and eccentrics were devised to explain and predict accurately the motions of the planets. At the same time, the horoscopic skills...