Location
Age
Area of FocusAbout Francesca's Work
Francesca Rochberg is an assyriologist who focuses on the emergence of science in antiquity.
Rochberg studies Babylonian astronomy and astrology, and their dissemination in ancient Greece. In her study of astrological texts of the second millennium B.C., she explores the nature of Babylonian astronomical inquiry, and the place of astronomy in Mesopotamian culture. Rochberg has published the books, Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination: The Lunar Eclipse Omens of Enuma Anu Enlil (1987), Babylonian Horoscopes (1998), and The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (2004).
Biography
Rochberg is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside. She was named the Michael Polanyi Visiting Lecturer of the History and Philosophy of Natural Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1996. She was a visiting scholar in the Department of the History of Science at Yale University (1989). Before that, she was at the University of Notre Dame in the Department of History, and previously was a research associate at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, where she was on the staff of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (1976-82).
Rochberg received a B.A. (1974) from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. (1980) from the University of Chicago.
Recent News
Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Office for the History of Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow (1993), a visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford (2006), and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2007), and is a senior fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. Her book, Babylonian Horoscopes (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 88, Pt.1, American Philosophical Society, 1998) won the 1999 John Frederick Lewis Award from the American Philosophical Society. Most recently, she published In the Path of the Moon: Babylonian Celestial Divination and Its Legacy (E.J. Brill, 2010) and Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (forthcoming, 2015).
Updated July 2015
Published on August 1, 1982
