The writings of pseudo-Petosiris (1)

Text
In the second century BCE a book in Greek was written on celestial omens closely related to those of Enūma Anu Enlil, and presented under the fictitious authorship of Petosiris. The fragments most closely related to the Mesopotamian texts use as omens eclipses, the heliacal rising of Sirius, and comets. One fragment (no. 6) uses as omens the colour of the eclipsed body; the simultaneous occurrence of winds blowing from several directions and of shooting stars, halos, lightning, and rain. Another fragment (no. 7), also on eclipse omens, seems to be also from an ancient source in which the scheme of geographical references was rather strictly limited to Egypt and its neighbours in contrast to the previous fragment, where the eclipses affect the whole Eurasian continent. The treatise of pseudo-Petosiris evidently included in a section on computing the date of the native’s conception, which seems to be an elaboration of the Babylonian method based on the position of the Moon. Two sets of fragments deal with the two problems - the date of native’s conception and the computation of the length of his life based on the rising times between the ascendant and the nonagesimal. The significance of pseudo-Petosiris’ works is their illumination of two important processes of Ptolemaic science: the development of the astral omens that the Egyptians of the Achaemenid period had derived from Mesopotamia, and the invention of a new science of astrology based on Greek astronomy and physics in conjunction with Hellenistic mysticism and Egypto-Babylonian divination from astral omens.

Sources (list of abbreviations)
pseudo-Petosiris, fr. 6
pseudo-Petosiris, fr. 7

Bibliography

Amar Annus

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