“If science is understood as the inquiry about nature and its phenomena” (p. 2), then how does ancient Mesopotamian culture – which did not have a conception of nature but went to great lengths to understand the phenomenal world – complicate, challenge, or accord with our ideas about science and its history? This is the question at the core of Rochberg's wide-ranging monograph, which simultaneously addresses fundamental principles within the history and philosophy of science and the intellectual foundations of ancient Mesopotamian scholarship. In her book, Rochberg weaves together primary sources from the ancient Near East and classical world alongside concepts and themes from a wide array of modern disciplines – from Assyriology, Classics, and the history and philosophy of science to anthropology, sociology, and economics – creating a dense network of authors and ideas that help to illuminate her many arguments.
Rochberg centres her book around cuneiform scholarship, exploring how the sources combine to render a complex Mesopotamian worldview that has the potential both to enrich and to problematize modern discussions of science, especially in its relationship to nature. Before Nature uses signs and omens in Mesopotamia as an entrée into an examination of the inadequacies of an objective, universal system that understands science in terms of nature and separates the divine, human, and non-human spheres into defined and discrete entities. Rochberg stresses that while notions of the normal and abnormal are at the heart of Babylonian observation and prediction, it is not the idea of objective biological, astronomical, or physical normality, but “what could be observed of regularity and irregularity from a visual standpoint” (p. 109), that is paramount. For Rochberg, what may be described as cuneiform science is “unified by a certain axis of knowledge … between human knower and the ordered phenomenal world” (p. 281), which does not exist independently of the human or divine. Through its examination of concepts like observation, prediction, modelling, and interpretation in ancient Mesopotamia, Before Nature formulates a bottom-up approach to cuneiform science and thought.
One of the strongest features of this monograph is its engagement with current discussions in the history and philosophy of science through the often overlooked lens of the cuneiform world. Drawing on ideas from Goodman, Hacking, Quine, Magnus, Churchland, and others, Rochberg deftly marshals evidence from ancient Mesopotamia in a discussion of whether natural kinds – or classes of objects that share a “universal essence” not determined through the knowledge or actions of humans, and “which science is equipped to discover” (p. 100) – can be said to exist. Rochberg argues that Mesopotamian lexical lists and determinatives are not naturally, but culturally and linguistically constituted, standing for “classes of things with multiple properties, not all of which are held in common by every member of the class” (p. 99). She notes that for both lexical lists and determinatives, the purpose of grouping items together was “not to inquire into how the world was physically constituted” (p. 98). Moreover, both of these sources of evidence blend the “real” and “unreal”, as in the Šikinšu Text for snakes, where names of mythological serpents are incorporated into a list of snakes otherwise found in the Mesopotamian world (p. 86), or the determinative ÍD for river, which “was used to indicate the names not only of rivers (a natural kind) but also of canals (an artifact)” (p. 96).
No less important are Rochberg's re-evaluations of past Assyriological examinations of Mesopotamian science and thought. The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, a popular mid-century collection of essays on the ancient Near East spearheaded by the Frankforts, receives considerable attention toward the beginning of this monograph. Rochberg's chief critique lies in the collection's mischaracterization of Mesopotamian civilization as mythopoeic (pp. 38–9) – and thus unscientific – because it failed to separate man (or god) from nature (p. 46). While Rochberg examines how the Intellectual Adventure forwarded both progressivist and romantic notions of anthropology and cognition (pp. 48–52), she notes that “the Frankforts’ cognitive-historical view was that whatever products of intellection were evident in the ancient Near East, they represented earlier stages of thought than philosophical or scientific reason” (p. 52). In discussing rationality in Mesopotamia, Before Nature assesses the works of Larsen and Bottéro, who each argued – often through examples drawn from divination – that ancient Mesopotamia developed towards rationality and science, but never fully reached these ideal destinations (pp. 140–5). Rochberg contends that Larsen and Bottéro's goal to show that Mesopotamian divination tended towards essentially Greek logical ideals was misguided, as “the decision as to whether divination is rational or irrational should depend on whether one deems the use of its forms of reasoning to be appropriate or inappropriate to its own cultural and epistemic norms” (pp. 145–6).
Though outweighed by the many positive elements in Before Nature, there are a few weaknesses in this important work. The “dense network of authors and ideas” that I alluded to in the introduction is occasionally difficult to navigate, and one can get distracted by the descriptions of previous scholarship that dot this monograph. Similarly, certain sections are oddly constructed – for example, in Rochberg's analysis of solar observation in the Neo-Assyrian celestial-divinatory reports, she only quotes and discusses material from the series Enūma Anu Enlil, and not from the reports themselves (pp. 214–5). Moreover, Rochberg occasionally introduces ideas and concepts from other frameworks while failing to explain how these concepts expand upon or deepen our knowledge of the Mesopotamian phenomena under discussion, such as with “observation statements” and “Empiricism” (pp. 203–5), the “empirical stance” (p. 229), “model-based reasoning” (p. 238), “analytic inquiry” (p. 256), and “practical inquiry” (p. 256).
Shortcomings aside, Before Nature is a very important work that re-conceptualizes science in ancient Mesopotamia. This monograph is a major contribution to both Assyriology and the history and philosophy of science, and will certainly become a central work to those interested in the intersection of these disciplines.
