Reading Room · Astrology · History
Where did astrology come from?
Astrology began in ancient Mesopotamia, where royal diviners read eclipses and other sky events as omens for the king. Babylonian scholars later fixed the twelve-sign zodiac and, by 410 BCE, cast the first known birth horoscopes. Greek astrologers in Egypt expanded the method, Ptolemy systematized it, and a 1930 British newspaper column began the modern horoscope page.
Facts checked on against 10 sources, 7 of them museum, university, archive, library, government or primary texts.
Quick timeline
Every line comes from a source listed at the bottom of the page. The small numbers point to it.
| Early 2nd millennium BCE | In the Old Babylonian period, royal diviners in Mesopotamia began interpreting celestial events such as eclipses as omens.1 |
|---|---|
| Early 7th c. BCE | By this time a specialist class of diviner, the Scribe of Enuma Anu Enlil, had emerged in Assyria, named for the roughly 70-tablet series of celestial omens they consulted.2 |
| c. 450 BCE | The zodiac, which had grown out of 18 reference constellations over about a thousand years, had become fixed by roughly this date.2 |
| 410 BCE | The earliest known horoscopes, from the cities of Babylon and Nippur, date to this year.2 |
| 2nd c. CE | Ptolemy, working in Alexandria (born c. 100, died c. 170 CE), wrote the Apotelesmatika, later called the Tetrabiblos for its four books, setting out the principles of astrology.34 |
| 1930 | On 24 August 1930, R. H. Naylor published a horoscope for the newborn Princess Margaret in a British newspaper, which led to a regular weekly astrology column.5 |
Omens for the king
The main purpose of the Mesopotamian celestial omen collections was to warn the royal court of coming disaster or success, often about war or the ruler and his family.6
These omens were read as signs rather than fixed fate, so the court's official forecaster could advise the king on ways to avoid a bad outcome.6
From sky omens to birth charts
After the Persians conquered Mesopotamia in the mid-first millennium BCE, Babylonian astrologers began applying the sky to the lives of ordinary people, not only kings.1
The zodiac signs on these tablets were 12 equal divisions of the band the Moon and planets travel along, each split into 30 smaller units like our degrees, and named for nearby constellations such as the Hired Man (our Aries).1
The two earliest known horoscopes, from Babylon and Nippur in 410 BCE, read much like celestial omens; the rest date from 298 to 69 BCE, and most list only a birth date and planetary positions.21
Greek astrology in Egypt and Ptolemy
Greek scholars took up Babylonian horoscopy in the first or second century BCE; about 200 Greek horoscopes survive, mostly papyri from Egypt, the earliest from the late first century BCE.1
Greek horoscopes added the horoskopos, the part of the zodiac rising in the east at the moment of birth, which gave the horoscope its name; their positions were worked out from tables rather than by watching the sky.1
In the Tetrabiblos, Ptolemy separated astronomy proper, which tracks the positions of the heavens, from a second, less self-sufficient art of judging how those positions affect earthly things.7
India, the Islamic world and Europe
India had astrology based on lunar mansions (nakshatras) in the early Vedic period; Mesopotamian omen ideas arrived with the Achaemenid Persians as early as the 5th century BCE, and Greek astrology followed in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, adapted through Sanskrit translations.6
The 9th-century Persian Muslim astrologer Abu Ma'shar (died 886) was translated into Latin from the 11th century; the University of Edinburgh holds a 12th-century Latin copy of his introduction to astrology.8
The newspaper horoscope
The well-known society astrologer Cheiro was unavailable in August 1930, so his assistant R. H. Naylor wrote the newspaper's horoscope for Princess Margaret, published three days after her birth.5
Reader interest, and a later forecast that seemed to match the October 1930 crash of the R101 airship, led the paper to give Naylor a weekly column, often credited as the first true newspaper horoscope column; by 1937 it was organized by the twelve sun signs.5
Then and now
Then
In Babylon, astrology rested on careful sky-watching: astrologers could draw on the Esagila temple's Astronomical Diaries, a running record of observations kept since at least the 7th century BCE.1
For Ptolemy, astrology was a companion to mathematical astronomy, the subject of his Almagest, rather than a separate pastime.73
Now
Astrology is widely regarded today as a pseudoscience, yet it has millions of followers, many of whom find comfort or entertainment in newspaper horoscopes.6
In Shawn Carlson's double-blind study, published in Nature in December 1985, astrologers who had helped design the test matched birth charts to personality-test profiles no better than chance, though they had predicted a hit rate of at least half against a chance rate of one third. Volunteers also did poorly at picking out their own chart readings, but Carlson drew no conclusion from that part because they failed to recognize their own personality-test results too.910
What we worked out
Not stated outright by any one source. This is our own arithmetic or reading of the sources cited.
- Taking 410 BCE and 69 BCE as the first and last known Babylonian horoscopes, cuneiform horoscopy spans roughly three and a half centuries; with the earliest Greek example only seven years after the last, the overlap between the two traditions is close to seamless.2
- Ptolemy's lifetime (c. 100 to c. 170 CE) puts the Tetrabiblos about five and a half centuries after the first known horoscopes of 410 BCE.23
- The modern sun-sign column is young by comparison: from Naylor's 1930 start to 2026 is 96 years.5
What we couldn't confirm
- Our sources date Ptolemy's life (c. 100 to c. 170 CE) but not the exact year he wrote the Tetrabiblos.
- The R. H. Naylor story rests here on a Smithsonian magazine article; we could not fetch the original 1930s Sunday Express pages, so details such as the 1937 switch to sun signs are not checked against the newspaper itself.
- Carlson's result has been challenged: a 2009 reanalysis by psychologist Suitbert Ertel argued for a marginal positive result, but we could not fetch that paper to check it.
- The exact date the zodiac settled into 12 equal signs, and the route by which Babylonian horoscopy reached the Greek world, are still debated; one scholarly review calls the route of transmission an open question.
Sources
Museums, universities, archives and primary texts first. We paraphrase; nothing is copied. We never cite Wikipedia.
- New York University Faculty Digital Archive: Alexander Jones, The Horoscope Casters (Archaeology Odyssey 3.6, 2000). Read on · University
- Bryn Mawr Classical Review: Review of Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (reviewed by Eleanor Robson), BMCR 2005.06.29. Read on · Peer-reviewed journal
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Ptolemy (by Alexander Raymond Jones). Read on · Encyclopedia
- LacusCurtius, University of Chicago (Loeb Classical Library translation by F. E. Robbins, 1940): Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos. Read on · Primary text
- Smithsonian Magazine: How Are Horoscopes Still a Thing? (Linda Rodriguez McRobbie). Read on · News
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Astrology. Read on · Encyclopedia
- LacusCurtius, University of Chicago (Loeb Classical Library translation by F. E. Robbins, 1940): Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I, chapters 1–3. Read on · Primary text
- University of Edinburgh Archives and Manuscript Collections: 'Dicta Albumassar' by Abu Ma'shar, a Latin version of his Introduction to Astrology, 12th century. Read on · Archive
- Nature: A double-blind test of astrology (Shawn Carlson), Nature 318, 419–425 (1985). Read on · Peer-reviewed journal
- University of California eScholarship (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory): Double-Blind Test of Astrology (preprint LBL-20480, S. Carlson). Read on · University