The Allure of the Ancient investigates how the ancient Middle East was imagined and appropriated for artistic, scholarly, and political purposes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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Program in Early Cultures
John Steele
PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF THE EXACT SCIENCES IN ANTIQUITY, Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology
Biography
John Steele is a historian of the exact sciences in antiquity. He specializes in the history of astronomy, with a particular focus on Babylonian astronomy. He is editor of the bookseries Scientific Writings from the Ancient and Medieval World and a member of the editorial boards of several bookseries and journals including Time, Astronomy, and Calendars and the Journal for the History of Astronomy. He holds an honourary Professorship at Shanghai in the School of History and Culture of Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and is a senior fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. Before coming to Brown, he held a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Durham University, was E. P. May Fellow at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, and was Dibner Institure Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.
Recent News
This collection of essays on cultural astronomy celebrates the life and work of Clive Ruggles, Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy at Leicester University. Taking their lead from Ruggles’ work, the papers present new research focused on three core themes in cultural astronomy: methodology, case studies, and heritage. Through this framework, they show how the study of cultural astronomy has evolved over time and share new ideas to continue advancing the field.
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This volume, edited by Christine Proust and John Steele, explores how scholars wrote, preserved, circulated, and read knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia. It offers an exercise in micro-history that provides a case study for attempting to understand the relationship between scholars and scholarship during this time of great innovation.
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Editors: Johannes Haubold, John Steele, and Kathryn Stevens
This volume of collected essays, the first of its kind in any language, investigates the Astronomical Diaries from ancient Babylon, a collection of almost 1000 clay tablets which, over a period of some five hundred years (6th century to 1st century BCE), record observations of selected astronomical phenomena as well as the economy and history of Mesopotamia and surrounding regions.
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This volume of collected essays, the first of its kind in any language, investigates the Astronomical Diaries from ancient Babylon, a collection of almost 1000 clay tablets which, over a period of some five hundred years (6th century to 1st century BCE), record observations of selected astronomical phenomena as well as the economy and history of Mesopotamia and surrounding regions.
The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN, by Hermann Hunger and Professor John Steele, contains an introductory essay, followed by a new edition of the text and a facing-page transliteration and English translation. Finally, the book contains a new and detailed commentary on the text.
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American Philosophical Society
The Cuneiform Uranology Texts: Drawing the Constellations (American Philosophical Society, 2018)
The Cuneiform Uranology Texts: Drawing the Constellations, by Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Eckart Frahm, Wayne Horowitz, and Professor John Steele presents a newly recovered group of cuneiform texts from first millennium Babylonia and Assyria that provide prose descriptions of the drawing (eṣēru) of Mesopotamian constellations.
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