Reviews for Babylonian Horoscopes

The average rating for Babylonian Horoscopes based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-25 00:00:00 Thomas Price The only in-depth look at the very beginnings of the cuneiform writing system that I have found. There is plenty of food for thought here, even though I disagree with several of the author's contentions. Early on the book addresses the nature of different systems of communication that use visual signs. The practice and principles of pictography are explored as well the development of syllabic values. Another chapter establishes the time and era of the invention as Southern Mesopotamia in the 34th century BCE. This covers the preliminaries, Only then do we get into the early signs themselves and the accounting context in which they appear. Subsequent chapters deal with how many signs were combined with one another or otherwise differentiated and multiplied. The author is always asking the question of how the signs, individually and collectively, convey the information that they do. Along the way many individual signs are explored in detail, along with some of the quirks - there are several signs that depict a human foot which mean 'to walk, stand, run etc however a human or animal 'foot' is consistently written with a sign that depicts an donkey's head. Even the ingenuity of the author cannot give any explanation for this unexpected anomaly! For me, some sections did go on a bit and some parts were not explained very well. Part of the problem is intrinsic to the study - as you need to develop a vocabulary to analyse the script and its functions. As Sumerian writing is so different from modern western scripts this need can only be met by a terminology derived from semantics and semiotics. Naturally this can make some discussions quite heavy-going. And I must admit at times, the Gallic flare and rather flowery language of the author were a little grating.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-24 00:00:00 David St. Laurent There's obviously a lot of great information in this, and it gave me ways of thinking about cuneiform which hadn't occurred to me before, but there's something about it that feels a bit disorganised or meandering. Is this just my attention span? Anyway, I'm left with a very joyful sense that we should see cuneiform as its own fully-fledged system, rather than as a mere antecedent of writing as we know it.