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Objects of knowledge exist within material, immaterial, and conceptual worlds. Once the world is conceived from the perspective of others, the physical ontology of modern science no longer functions as a standard by which to understand other orderings of reality, whether from ethnographical or historical sources. Because premodern and non-western sources attest to a plurality of sciences practiced in accordance with different ways of worldmaking from that of the modern West, their study belongs to the history of science, the philosophy of science, and the sociology of science, as well as the anthropology of science. In Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity, Francesca Rochberg extends an anthropology of science to the historical world of cuneiform texts of ancient Babylonia. Exploring how Babylonian science has been understood, she proposes a new direction for scholarship by recognizing the world of ancient science, not as a less developed form of modern science, but as legitimate and real in its own right.
List of contents
Introduction; Part I. Historiography of Science: 1. These bones live; 2. Cuneiform texts and the historiography of science; 3. The early shaping of a modern historiography of ancient astronomical sciences; Part II. Worldmaking and the Anthropology of Science: 4. The idea of worlds; 5. Uses of diversity; 6. Worldmaking in cuneiform culture; 7. Imago mundi; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index of names and subjects.
About the author
Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. A John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow and John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2008. Rochberg is the author of The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (2008) and Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (2022).
