The Place of Astronomy in Roman Egypt

Abstract

In 1855 an English clergyman, the Revd.Henry Stobart, returned from a sojourn of several months in Egypt bringing back with him various papyri and other antiquities.He sold the papyri to the British Museum, and the other artifacts to a Liverpool goldsmith named Joseph Mayer, who added them to the large and valuable collection of miscellaneous antiquities that he donated twelve years later to the City of Liverpool. 1 Before parting with his acquisitions, however, Stobart had shown them to the Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch.Brugsch was sufficiently interested in four wooden tablets with Demotic writing, bought and, allegedly, found at Thebes, to oversee the preparation of a facsimile which Stobart had printed as Plate Π of a pamphlet of five large-format plates in Paris; and the next year Brugsch published a monograph in which he presented the tablets again in facsimile, but now with a translation and commentary. 2 Brugsch arrived at an essentially correct insight into the nature of the Stobart Tablets, that they record in tabular form the motion of the planets over a succession of years, including the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian.