Hello, dear one.
Come outside with me for a moment.
Look up—past the rooftops, past the satellites, past the city lights. Look into the deep dark, the one your ancestors knew by heart. A sky so clear it looks like it’s made of fire.
Thousands of stars. Some fixed. Some wandering. Some flickering low to the horizon like they’re not sure they belong.
Now imagine you’ve never seen a map. Never heard of a planet. All you have is this sky—every night, for your whole life.
And imagine you're a shepherd.
You live outside the city walls. You walk with your animals across dry hills and riverbanks. You sleep wrapped in wool and dust. And every night, when the world goes quiet, the sky becomes your ceiling. Your clock. Your companion.
You see it better than anyone else because it’s always there. And after a while, you start to notice things.
That bright star rises before dawn at a certain time of year. That cluster hangs low in summer, high in winter. The moon’s face changes slowly, then disappears, then returns.
No one taught you this. You simply watched.
You didn’t name the stars.
You noticed them.
And that, dear one, is the beginning of astronomy.
Not temples. Not telescopes. Not mathematicians or empires. Just a human, watching the sky long enough to see a pattern. And once they saw the pattern—they remembered.
That’s what I love most. They didn’t need to explain the sky. They just kept track. They began to trust the rhythm. And then—somewhere along the way—they began to mark it down. Maybe in dirt. Maybe with pebbles. Maybe eventually, in clay.
They didn’t want to conquer the heavens.
They just wanted to know when to move the herd.
When the rains might come.
When the river might flood.
It wasn’t science yet. But it was attention. And attention is always the beginning of wisdom.
So tonight, we begin with the shepherds.
Before temples. Before scholars. Before calendars and omens and charts. Just the open sky, and a person who stayed awake long enough to see.
Because even before there were stories, there was the sky.
And someone who remembered it.
Let me tell you about the ones who watched.
They weren’t sages in robes or temple priests holding sacred scrolls—not at first. The first sky-watchers were people like you. People with sore feet and sunburned skin. People who worked outside. Who woke with the animals and walked by starlight.
Shepherds. Herders. Travelers.
They didn’t have titles or temples. What they had was time. And attention. And that turned out to be enough.
Because when you live under the sky, you can’t help but notice it. When you sleep beside the same rock outcrop for three nights and see the same stars shift slightly westward each evening, it makes you wonder. When the moon vanishes, and then three nights later reappears—thinner, like a coin worn down—you start to ask questions.
At first, maybe those questions are quiet.
But over time, they become patterns.
And patterns become records.
That’s where the scribes eventually came in—not to invent astronomy, but to preserve it. What began as noticing—passed from shepherd to son, from elder to apprentice—gradually made its way into cities, into temples, into clay.
Because the city-dwellers needed what the shepherds knew.
The watchers had figured out when the river would flood.
When to plant.
When to travel.
When to expect rain—or not.
You see, long before the stars were turned into signs, they were just signposts—guides for people trying to survive.
And the Akkadians, brilliant organizers that they were, started collecting this knowledge. Writing it down. Systematizing it. That’s when astronomy as a discipline began to form—not with telescopes or theories, but with scribes who took what shepherds had already seen and gave it structure.
I can picture them: hunched over clay tablets by torchlight, copying symbols from older fragments. Translating observations into lunar calendars. Making star lists. Sometimes guessing. Sometimes correcting.
They didn’t always get it right.
But they knew it mattered.
And that’s what makes them astronomers—not because they had perfect models, but because they kept track. They noticed. They recorded. They passed it on.
No one remembers their names. But their notebooks—if you can call a slab of clay a notebook—still survive.
They didn’t chase fame. They chased understanding.
And when you do that, dear one, you join a very old tradition: not of answers, but of careful questions.
Let me show you what they saw.
Imagine you're standing at the edge of a field. The fire has burned low, the sheep are quiet, and above you—the sky moves.
Not all at once. Not loudly. But it moves.
And someone, a long time ago, realized: the moon doesn’t just drift. It cycles. It grows fat and full, then disappears into nothing—and does it all over again, on schedule.
So they tracked it. First with memory. Then with marks. Then with math.
Eventually, the Akkadians knew the moon had a 29-day cycle. They built lunar calendars. They could even guess when an eclipse might happen—not exactly, but often enough to impress a king.
And that wasn’t all.
They noticed Venus—bright, insistent, rising in the east just before dawn. Then vanishing. Then returning again from the west. It followed a pattern too. They tracked its appearances and disappearances until they could predict them across years.
You see where this is going, right?
They weren’t just watching stars for fun. They were starting to realize something big:
The heavens are not chaos. They are rhythm.
Some of these rhythms—like Venus’s 8-year cycle—took generations to recognize. Think about that. To track a pattern that unfolds over 8 years, you need people to remember. You need someone to keep records, to compare them, to pass them on. You need tradition—not just curiosity.
And they had it.
They recorded eclipses. They marked the solstices. They tracked the strange looping path of planets like Mars and Jupiter—planets that don’t behave like stars, that seem to zigzag across the sky.
Later, the Greeks would call these wandering lights “planētēs”—wanderers. But the Akkadians noticed them first.
They even began organizing the stars into constellations—not like the zodiac signs you might know today, but their own figures: the plow, the lion, the scorpion. These helped them navigate both space and time.
Because when you see the Scorpion rise in the east? You know it’s harvest season.
That’s not myth.
That’s a calendar.
And slowly, what began as shepherds watching the sky became something more.
A science.
Maybe not one that looks like physics or astronomy today. But one built on observation, recordkeeping, and the patience to ask: will this happen again?
That question is the beating heart of science. And it was already echoing, thousands of years ago, on a rooftop in Babylon.
Have you ever tried to remember something important, not just for yourself, but for someone who won’t be born for a hundred years?
That’s what they were doing.
These early astronomers weren’t just looking at the stars. They were writing them down. Not in notebooks or apps, but on tablets—clay tablets, soft as dough when wet, hard as stone when baked in the sun.
The act of writing itself was slow, deliberate. Each mark pressed with a reed stylus, each line telling a piece of the sky’s story. And once those marks dried? They stayed.
This is how memory became durable.
You can’t keep the sky in your pocket. But you can press its rhythm into clay. That’s what the Akkadian and later Babylonian scribes did. They turned stars into symbols. Motion into math. Time into tablets.
I’ve seen some of them—broken, weathered, half-translated. One of the most famous is called Mul.Apin. It’s not a story. It’s not a myth. It’s a catalog. A compendium of stars, constellations, risings and settings, weather signs, and agricultural markers.
It’s not beautiful in the way poetry is beautiful. But it’s breathtaking in its discipline. In its ambition.
Because it shows you what they were really doing: creating the first observational science.
They didn’t have explanations yet—no gravity, no heliocentrism, no scientific method. But they had data. They had memory. They had hundreds of years of watching and comparing and correcting and recording.
And most of all—they had the will to preserve.
It would have been easy to let it all fade. To say, “We don’t need this; the priests will know.” Or, “Why write it down when the sky will always be there?” But they didn’t think that way.
They trusted clay more than legend. They believed that what they saw could outlast them—if they recorded it carefully enough.
And so they did.
That’s what I mean when I say the stars weren’t just watched. They were captured. Not as prisoners, but as guests—invited onto tablets, into libraries, into the slow current of human knowledge.
Do you see how powerful that is?
They couldn’t fly. They couldn’t zoom. But they could remember—with astonishing precision.
And when memory is kept that carefully, it stops being personal. It becomes civilizational.
So why did they do it?
Why spend generations tracking the sky with no guarantee anyone would ever understand it? Why mark the moons, the risings, the eclipses—when the stars don’t care if you’re watching?
Because we care.
And for the Akkadians, that care became useful.
You see, once you notice that the stars follow a rhythm, you can start to plan your life around it. You can predict the flooding of the rivers. You can mark the best times to plant and harvest. You can even begin to schedule festivals and ceremonies in harmony with the sky.
For kings, this meant legitimacy—“Look, the gods favor me; the eclipse came just when I said it would.” For farmers, it meant survival. For priests, it meant power.
But for the astronomers?
I think it meant something deeper: a glimpse of order in a world that often felt chaotic.
Because remember—this was a time of uncertainty. Floods. Droughts. Wars. Death. Most of life was unpredictable. But the stars? The stars kept their pace.
To recognize that... to trust that... is a kind of courage.
They began to believe that the heavens reflected the earth—and if you could learn one, you could understand the other. That idea—of a patterned universe, readable by observation—was a gift they passed down.
I’ve seen that idea echo across centuries.
It passed to the Greeks, who asked not just when, but why.
It moved through the Islamic Golden Age, where scholars preserved and expanded on Babylonian methods.
It resurfaced in Renaissance Europe, where Copernicus and Kepler drew on ancient observations to rethink the entire cosmos.
And yet—none of that would have been possible without those first watchers. The ones who turned awe into inquiry, and inquiry into record.
They didn’t always separate astronomy from astrology. They believed omens and stars shared the same breath. That wasn’t foolishness—it was an attempt to connect the human world to something larger. To ask, What comes next? And hope the sky might answer.
Isn’t that still what we do?
When we check the weather. When we mark a full moon. When we watch a rocket disappear into the dark.
We’re still looking up.
Still wondering.
Still hoping for rhythm.
The Akkadian astronomers didn’t just study the stars.
They taught us that the universe might be knowable—if we care enough to watch.
Before I go, I want to return you to the night.
Not a modern night. Not the one outside your window, dimmed by traffic lights and glowing screens. I mean the real night—the old night. A black canvas, alive with stars.
Now imagine you’ve never heard of astronomy. No science classes. No space probes. No constellations named by Romans or Greeks. Just you, a fire, the soft breath of animals sleeping nearby, and that enormous sky.
That’s where it all began.
Not with knowledge, but with noticing.
The first astronomers didn’t name stars to own them. They didn’t chart constellations to sell maps. They simply paid attention. And then—they remembered. And then—they shared that memory.
On clay.
On stone.
In rhythm.
That’s what humbles me the most: the fragility of it all. The tablets could’ve broken. The names could’ve faded. The patterns could’ve been forgotten. But they weren’t. Because someone, somewhere, decided the sky was worth preserving.
Someone handed that memory forward.
And maybe they didn’t get every prediction right. Maybe they mixed observation with myth, calculation with ritual. But they did something rare and powerful:
They took awe… and turned it into order.
They looked up and said, “This matters.”
And then they wrote it down.
So now I ask you, dear one: What do you see when you look up?
Not what the textbooks say. Not what the apps tell you. But what you see.
What rhythm do you notice?
What quiet pattern waits for your attention?
Because the sky hasn’t changed. But the watchers? That’s you now.
You inherit their questions.
You inherit their silence.
And maybe—just maybe—you inherit their wonder, too.
They didn’t light the stars.
But they lit a path.
And now… it’s yours to follow.
oh—one more thing—I have a wish for you.
Someday, when the time is right, I hope you find a way to step away from the lights. Away from traffic. Away from noise. Away from anything that tries to outshine the stars.
Go camping, maybe. Out where it’s quiet. In the hills, or the desert, or the forest. Somewhere far from the hum of electricity. Bring a sleeping bag, but not a tent. Sleep out under the sky—really under it.
Let the stars be your roof.
Lie on the grass, or the sand, or the stone, and let your eyes adjust. It will take time. First you’ll see a dozen stars. Then a hundred. Then thousands. Let them come to you.
And then—just wait.
Don’t talk. Don’t rush. Just watch.
Watch as the stars seem to wheel around you, like the whole universe is turning.
If you fall asleep, good. That’s part of it. But I hope you wake in the middle of the night, just for a moment, and see how the sky has shifted. How what was above you is now to the side. How the earth has turned beneath you, and the stars have kept their rhythm.
And while you lie there, half dreaming, I hope you remember the shepherds.
Those first watchers.
The ones who slept like this every night, thousands of years ago. No clocks. No forecasts. Just instinct, and memory, and that enormous sky.
They didn’t name the stars.
They noticed them.
Now it’s your turn.
Until next time,
Much love.
Harmonia