For the Babylonians anything unusual was an omen – a warning of disaster they believed could be averted by performing an appropriate ritual. Their interpretation of omens was based on past experience recorded on about seventy tablets with some seven thousand omens. Known as the Enuma and to have taken definitive form before 900 BC, it was a list of past signals supposedly sent from the gods to the king.
The Babylonian’s calendar, like Egypt’s, was also lunar and from time to time they, too, supplemented the normal year of twelve months with a thirteenth, intercalary month. For a long time these intercalations followed no rule until around the fifth century BC it was realised that nineteen solar years are very close to 235 lunar months and since 235=(19×12)+7 the intercalations thereafter followed a pattern of seven months in every nineteen years (known as the Metonic Cycle after Meton, the fifth-century BC Athenian astronomer). This cycle became apparent when the scribes of the Enuma began to observe astronomy phenomena looking for unusual events, but their records inadvertently revealed the regularities of the motions of the Sun, Moon and the planets.
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