sent as a portent of death? Merry regards the reference to an eclipse as not impossible, but he thinks the blotting out of the Sun is merely the climax of the vision. Van Leeuwen does not even deign to notice the ancient interpretation. On the other side, Herwart von Hohenburg[1] in 1612 went so far as to date the return of Odysseus and the Trojan war by means of the eclipse. I suspect that the eclipse was in the legend as Homer received it, but I am not prepared to use it to date the Trojan war.
Eclipse of Babylon.
I will pass now to another eastern eclipse. A contemporary Babylonian chronicle of portents[2] states that 'on the twenty-sixth day of the month Sivan in the seventh year the day was turned to night'. The record belongs to the eleventh century B.C., and there was an eclipse of the Sun in B.C. 1063, on July 31,[3] which may well have been at the end of Sivan, though it should be the 28th not the 26th day of the lunar month, and this eclipse was total in southern Babylonia. If the record refers to a total eclipse of the Sun, it becomes one of the foundation stones of Babylonian chronology, and Professor Langdon so regards it. Unfortunately the name of the king in whose seventh year the phenomenon occurred is lost. Professor Langdon suggests Nabu-shum-libur.
- ↑ Novae, verae, et exacte ad calculum astronomicum revocatae chronologiae (1612), 10. The eclipse on which he fixes is that of B.C. 709 July 18, and he concludes that the fall of Troy was in B.C. 712.
- ↑ King, Chronicles concerning early Babylonian Kings (1907), ii. 76.
- ↑ I may perhaps to avoid confusion explain that in this lecture I reckon by the system used by historians of dates before Christ, reckoned by ordinal numbers expressed as cardinals. Astronomers reckon by negative cardinals, so that their o is the historical B.C. 1, their –1 is the historical B.C. 2, their –1062 is the historical B.C. 1063.
