The Babylonians considered the corpus of celestial omens, called Enuma Anu Enlil, the culmination of scholarship. A modern edition of this series of 70 tablets was initiated by Erica Reiner in cooperation with David Pingree in 1975. Since then tablets 63 (Venus; 1975), 50-51 (fixed stars; 1981) and 12-22 (lunar eclipses; 1988, by F. Rochberg-Halton) have been published.
The present volume brings an edition of tablets 22-29, devoted to the sun and dealing with a variety of phenomena, such as its sighting in clouds of particular shapes and colours and in a halo, the appearance of "disks" (parhelion, paraselene etc.), the sun's radiance and colours, unexpected appearances and early risings, athmospheric phenomena at sunrise and sunset, conjunction with planets and stars, and features called "glow" and coloured "webs".
The edition follows the pattern of earlier volumes, providing introductions, transliterations, translations and short notes for each tablet, together with colophons, ancient commentaries (on parts of all tablets), excerpts (of tablets 24-26), and unplaced fragments. The original tablets (from Assur, Babylon and Nineveh) have been collated and new sources are offered in 15 photographs. Indexes list all words, names and texts.
A volume dealing with solar eclipses, by F. Rochberg-Halton, will be published in the same series by the Netherlands Institute for the Near East, Leiden, in due time.