ABSTRACT
Over y years ago, the English scholar E.S. Drower published a careful edition of the Mandean ‘Book of the Zodiac’. Shortly a erwards, it was reviewed in the American journal Isis by George Sarton, then the doyen of the history of science, who described the book as ‘a wretched collection of omens, debased astrology, and miscellaneous nonsense’. In the next issue of that journal Otto Neugebauer, the historian of ancient astronomy, wrote a reply ‘to explain to the reader why a serious scholar might spend years on the study of wretched subjects like ancient astrology’.1
