ASTRONOMICAL TABLET CDLI P008218 ( 3500-3350 BC)


(The tablet in CDLI with no translation)

Provenance - Susa (mod. Shush).
Period Uruk V (ca. 3500-3350 BC) .
Language undetermined.

https://cdli.ucla.edu/search/search_results.php?SearchMode=Text&order=PrimaryPublication&Collection=louvre&Period=uruk&requestFrom=Search

Left - original, right - my interpretation about content, based on the CDLI line art.





 

The idea of ​​the content of the TABLET:

This is astronomical knowledge from period of Uruk V (ca. 3500-3350 BC.
The tablet shows 3 columns representing Venus synodic period, Earth period, and Syrius Sothic cycle.
5 synodic years of Venus are 8 years of Earth and 2 Sothic cycles of Sirius

1. Refusal to decode based on something like the archaic S (Uruk) system?
See Peter Damerow, Robert Englund , Die Zahlenzeichensyateme der archaischet Texte, стр. в Fruehe Schrift und Techniken der Wirtschafts verwaltung im alten Vorderen Orient, Verlag Franz Becker und Max-Plank-Institut fuer Bildungforschung


1.1.  Older meaning of the cuneiform signs of the tablet:

2.1. The signs of each column mean a certain number of periods of some celestial body.

 Based to elements number in each column.

2.2. The sum of each column in Earth days is equal, or the sum of the right column equals the sum of the middle column equals the sum of the left column.

2.3. The middle column, consisting of 8 periods of the Earth"s Sidereal Period, the time it takes the planet to make a complete revolution around the Sun - or a rounded 365 days. The signs are 8. 8 x 365 or a total of 2920 days.

2.4. The right column of 5 signs represents the 5 synodic periods of Venus, each 584 Earth days long. 2920 in total.

2.5. The left column represents 2 Sothis cycles of 1460 Earth days.

3.
3.1. The beginning of such coincidences can be observed either at the heliacal risинг of Sirius.

3.2. Or when Venus transits across the solar disk. In this case, the best position of Sirius in the sky can be observed simultaneously with the heliacal rise of Venus and with a total solar eclipse.

The period during which the heliacal rise of Sirius again coincides with the beginning of the year of 365 days. As two Sothis periods of 1460 days are 2920. We leave aside the problem of the Earth year according to the Egyptian or Julian calendar and the resulting difference in the sum of 1460 or 1461 days. Not because it is unimportant, but to highlight the main things from the content of the tablet.

The problem

A nagging problem arises from this seemingly logical hypothesis.
Why isn"t the tablet sorted Sirius+Sun, Venus, Earth?

This is possible only if we assume that Venus was once an outer planet - farther from the Sun than Earth. Velikovsky would take it as a confirmation of his hypothesis of the birth of Venus, as a detachment of the planetary mass from Jupiter. Let"s leave aside Velikovsky, his hypothesis and the question of whether Venus was an outer planet.

Let it be assumed that such an orbit of Venus did not exist.

Then, the actual transit of Venus across the solar disk assuming a heliacal rising of Sirius cannot be showed by this cuneiform tablet. Then, another (missing) cuneiform tablet must exist.

As shown on the tablet, Earth is between Sirius and Venus. If we refer to the popular Egyptological claim of a heliacal rising of Sirius, then the tablet shows something impossible - when Sirius rises with the Sun, it is impossible for Venus to be "behind" the Earth on the opposite side of the world/west.

Such a tablet would not cause any problems in parsing and.. especially interpretations of the rising of Sirius from the traditional understanding of Egyptologists... except adding the heliacal rising of Venus to the heliacal rising of Sirius.

Why is Venus not between Sirius and Earth on the tablet? Such a possible tablet has either not been found or does not correspond to the essence of the information embedded by the ancients about some important celestial configurational recurrence. An interesting task is to understand how exactly such a configuration was important to the ancients

This interpretation of the arrangement of the synodic periods of the two celestial bodies from the original plate raises a number of questions:

- Why is the natural arrangement of Sirius, Earth and Venus disturbed? Venus can only be between the heliacal rise of Sirius and Earth. Not so on the tablet!

- If the original tablet is to be believed, then the only possibility is an arrangement where Venus and Sirius are at opposite ends of the sky, which has two variants;
(see the arrangement in the drawing below right)

-- the first  for the sunrise of Sirius to observe a heliacal sunset of Venus.or
-- the second at the heliacal sunrise of Venus for Sirius to set.

let"s put it aside  the possibility of the position of Sirius at sunrise or sunset, which is probably the orientation of the Thracian temples.

Not considered here is the semi-fantastic/semi Zacharia Sitchin possibility that 1460 is the synodic period of a planet that once existed in the Solar System. As long as 1460 days is not a sothic cycle of Sirius, then the hypothesis remains that it is a celestial body in an orbit outside the Earth, and then the position would also be valid somewhere at the beginning of the asteroid belt... Or even that 1460 days was a synodic period of an inner planet that was between Venus and Earth This hypothesis is set aside.

I am tempted to leave it to the pleasure of Egyptologists to rethink the Sirius heliacal sunrise/set option from the information contained in the tablet CDLI no. P00821B.