ABSTRACT
In antiquity there was disagreement over whether astrology originated in Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, or in Egypt. The name ‘Chaldaean’, which in the first place referred to the people who provided the last dynasty which ruled in Babylon before Cyrus of Persia, came commonly by the Roman period to designate all astrologers, regardless of ethnic origin. On the other hand, as Egypt, since the time of the fifth-century historian Herodotus, was judged the repository of antique wisdom, astrologers tended to claim that the ‘ancient Egyptians’ were their sources.
