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Babylonian House Numbers and Squares of Zodiacal Signs: The Origin of the Quadruplicities, Part I

2022· article· en· W4292111385 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Lis Brack‐Bernsen

Bibliographic record

VenueAestimatio Sources and Studies in the History of Science · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicAncient Near East History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsZodiacal lightSign (mathematics)New moonMathematicsLine (geometry)Section (typography)CombinatoricsHistoryPhysicsAstronomyComputer scienceGeometryMathematical analysis

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BM 47762 is the rest of a circular tablet, which was divided into 12 sectors by lines from the center to the rim. Each sector was labelled by a zodiacal sign. Our tablet consists in part of the sectors IX, X, XI, and XII, which are concerned with the zodiacal signs of Sagittarius (month IX), Capricorn (month X), Aquarius (month XI), and Pisces (month XII). In lines 2 to 5 of each sector, some four numbers are written, which in pairs can be understood as a date (month, day) or as a position (sign, degree)—just as in the Dodecatemoria and its inverse, the Calendar Texts (Kalendertexte). The combination of number pairs on BM 47762 do not appear in those schemes. However, the difference between the pairs in lines 3, 4, and 5 is always equal to 277, a very special number which is known from the Calendar Texts. Evidently, our number pairs must somehow be connected to those number schemes. This paper investigates and finds a very interesting connection. It shows that all number pairs stand for dates, for which the Dodecatemoria scheme will give the position of the schematic Moon in its four important phases. The second number pairs refer to the months of the section, while the first pairs give the dates of the four important lunar phases three months earlier. The two dates on each line correspond to lunar positions taking place at almost the same position in the zodiac. The zodiacal signs of the lunar phases on days 7, 14, 21, and 28 join to squares which are mostly known from Greek astrology. For example, for month XI, the signs of the Moon have the numbers 2, 5, 8, and 11, i.e., the zodiacal square with 11 as one of the corners. Maybe we here have found the origin of the quadruplicities of the zodiacal signs. Published Online (2022-07-31)Copyright © 2022 by Lis Brack-Bernsen Article PDF Link: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/aestimatio/article/view/39087/29776 Corresponding Author: Lis Brack-Bernsen, University of RegensburgE-Mail: lis.brackbernsen@ur.de

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.999
Threshold uncertainty score0.157

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0030.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0470.016

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.

Opus teacher head0.084
GPT teacher head0.263
Teacher spread0.179 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

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Citations1
Published2022
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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