ABSTRACT
Much of the knowledge included in the contemporary tablets of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires of the mid-first millennium BCE dated back centuries, and even millennia, perhaps as far back as the invention of the cuneiform script in the late fourth millennium BCE, or even beyond into the mists of oral tradition. Each tablet, to use an analogy, provides us with a snap-shot of ancient knowledge and information that was passed from generation to generation of scribes, and from place to place within the cuneiform world. This chapter examines the transmission of star-names from the ancient world to the modern, showing how the modern reader of cuneiform writing is able to use the decoding devices of the modern disciplines of philology and Assyriology to identify ancient star-names written in cuneiform. It presents that discusses different problems arising from the communication of ancient star-names over time and place solved by means of Assyriology.
