This collection of essays is intended to explore the development of celestial omens in Mesopotamia, their relationship to the astrology developed in the Hellenistic period by the Greeks, and the spread of astrology to the East and its amplification there. In these studies I have attempted to illustrate the incredible facility with which these sciences, which serve as an example for other systems of knowledge, were transmitted from one culture to another, and to indicate a few ways in which the recipient cultures changed the received theories. I have and will write more extensively elsewhere about the technical transformations that accompanied the transmissions.

For this book is not a technical history of the origins and internal development of astrology, but a simple narrative, based on all ofthe known original sources, of a number of cases of transmission. The first and last chapters deal with the transmission of knowledge within the cultures of Mesopotamia and India respectively; the second with the creation of astrology, in part from material transmitted from Mesopotamia, in the Greek East; the third with the transmission of astrology to India from Greece; the fourth with the evidence for the transmission of astrology to Sasanian Iran from Greece and India; the fifth with an indian astrologer serving some of the early 'Abbasid caliphs; the sixth with the transmission of Arabic/Persian astrology to India....