Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Divination in the Ancient Near East took many forms. One of the most important practices, however, was astrology—the art of observing the sky and weather for signs. The first written evidence for this began in the late third millennium BCE, but it probably existed even earlier. Throughout the early and middle centuries of the second millennium BCE, there are glimpses of astrology preserved in letters and other texts. It was not until the end of the second millennium that the practice began to be codified and written down in standard works. During the Neo‐Assyrian period (911–609 BCE) astrology gained a new level of importance in the royal court with scholars (employed by the court) constantly watching the sky and writing to the king. Finally, during the latter half of the first millennium BCE (the Neo‐Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Hellenistic periods), astrology underwent a period of innovation alongside the continued use of standard practices. Throughout its history, Mesopotamian astrology functioned together with other forms of divination. The examination of an animal's liver, for example, was often used to check the results of an astrological observation. Astrology was one of many ways the messages of the gods could be decoded in the Ancient Near East. It developed a complicated series of texts and skilled practitioners and had a great impact on the fate of its adherents.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".