Text
Strabo, speaking of the Chaldean schools of astronomy in various towns of Mesopotamia mentions Kidenas, Naburianos and Sudines. According to Pliny (NH 2.6 (8)) the same Kidenas had recognised that Mercury is never more than 23⁰ from the sun. This Kidenas was probably contemporary with Sudines, who lived in the second half of the third century BCE. The astrologer Vettius Valens, who wrote under the Antonines, tells us that he attempted to make for the purpose of determining eclipses, but, as time failed him, “he resolved to make use of Hipparchus for the sun, and Sudines, Kidenas and Apollonius for the moon … putting in their proper places the equinoxes and solstices at the eighth degree of the signs of the zodiac” (Anthol. 9.11)
Further, a passage in an anonymous commentary on Ptolemy represents Kidenas as the inventor of an ecliptic period of 251 lunations (synodic months) and 269 anomalistic revolutions, the authorship of which was usually attributed to Hipparchus of Nicaea (CCAG 7.2). It appears from this treatise that Hipparchus did not adopt simultaneously, as was believed, two ecliptic periods, one large, of 4267 lunations and 4573 anomalistic revolutions, and one small, one seventeenth of the former, consisting of 251 lunations and 269 anomalistic revolutions, but that he borrowed this latter from Kidenas and appears merely to have multiplied it by 17 in order to make it correspond to a nearly exact number of years, say 4612 sidereal revolutions (345 years) minus 7½⁰. Now on a lunar table engraved in the fourth century in cuneiform characters on 18 columns can be read the signature Ki-din-nu. The astronomer Kidinnu is to be identified with the Kidenas of the Greeks, because the equivalence of 251 synodic and 269 anomalistic months, which Ptolemy’s commentator attributes to him, is found precisely stated in this tablet of Kidinnu, and further the same tablet he places the equinoxes and the solstices at the 8th degree of the signs of the zodiac, as did Valens, who quotes the canons of Kidenas. To Hipparchus, on the contrary, the commencement of spring is the 0⁰ of the Ram, but the Roman calendars usually adopted the 8th degree in conformity with the ancient usage of Babylon.
Kidenas or Kidinnu belongs to that group of hellenised Chaldeans who in the third century BCE devoted themselves to the task of rendering accessible to the Greeks the treasures of knowledge which were contained in the cuneiform documents amassed in the libraries of their native land. On these traditional data he based the hypothesis of a new ecliptic period more correct than that of his Chaldean predecessors, which was employed by Hipparchus and afterwards by Ptolemy. The very quotations which are made from his works by Western writers prove that he had translated them into Greek and that he thus enriched Hellenic astronomy with these lunar canons which were based on the observations taken at Babylon.
Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum 7.2
Pliny the Elder, Naturalia Historia 2.6 (8)
Vettius Valens, Anthology 9.11
Bibliography
| Cumont 1912, 62-65 | Cumont, Franz. Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans. American Lectures on the History of Religions 8. New York, London: G. P. Putnam's Sons 1912. |
Links (external links will open in a new browser window)
Kidenas
Cf. Chaldean schools of astronomy (1)
Amar Annus
URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0000788.php
|
