Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa recovered from the library at Nineveh, is a 7th century cuneiform tablet that bears ancient records of the rise times of Venus. Several dates for the original observations have been proposed: 1702, 1646, 1582 and 1419 BC. The information copied on the surviving tablet was first compiled during the reign of king Ammisaduqa, grandson of Hammurabi of the First Dynasty of Babylon. The tablet is currently part of the British Museum collections.

First published in 1870 by Henry Creswicke Rawlinson and George Smith as tablet 63, in "Tablet of Movements of the Planet Venus and their Influences" (The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, volume III). The tablet's significance for corroborating Babylonian chronology was first recognised by Franz Xaver Kugler in 1912, when he could identify the enigmatic "Year of the Golden Throne" ("Venus" tablet K.160) with the 8th year of the reign of Ammisaduqa. Since then, this 7th-century BCE copy has been interpreted to support several chronologies in the 2nd millennium BC.

The tablets had been copied and recopied over many centuries. Immanuel Velikovsky interpreted the few scribal errors that crept in as evidence for a peturbation of Venus' orbit when writing Worlds in Collision, avoiding the rest of the text that shows a high degree of regularity.