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March 2005 "A contemporary source: the Astronomical diary If we ignore a handful of inscriptions and a passing remark by the Athenian orator Aeschines, the only contemporary, primary source on Alexander is the Astronomical diary that was kept in the Esagila, the temple of the Babylonian supreme god Marduk. It contains a day-by-day account of celestial phenomena, but also mentions other events, such as the level of the Euphrates, meteorological phenomena, food prices, incidents concerning Babylon and its temples, and political events. After all, celestial phenomena were omens of important political changes. From the Astronomical diary: the battle of Gaugamela the death of Alexander Nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeologists have excavated millions of cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia and Iran, and it has been impossible to publish them all. As a consequence of this backlog, the Astronomical diary still contains lacunas. Nonetheless, it contains very interesting information, such as the prizes of commodities when Alexander's army was in Babylonian (sky high: the governor of the city had to close the market), an otherwise unknown invasion by Arabian tribesmen, and the correct dates of certain events (e.g., Alexander died on 11 June 323 BCE; more...). The most intriguing information from the Astronomical diary, however, is related to the battle of Gaugamela, which was fought on 1 October 331. It suggests that the Persian soldiers were demoralized and states that they left their king and fled during the battle (text). This is exactly the opposite of what we read in the four tertiary sources, Diodorus, Curtius Rufus, Plutarch and Arrian: they write that Darius left his soldiers. The difference is easily explained. The battle was fought on a very dusty plain and it was impossible to see what was going on. At the end of the day, the Macedonians found themselves masters of the field, tried to reconstruct what had happened and assumed that Darius had fled. The official account of the battle was written by Callisthenes of Olynthus (below) and as we will see, the stories of Diodorus, Curtius Rufus, Plutarch and Arrian are derived from this account. Modern reconstructions of the battle of Gaugamela that ignore the Astronomical diary are therefore nothing but reconstructions of what the Macedonians thought that had happened, and not of the battle itself. The Astronomical diary is a very important source, and we can be confident that similar sources are waiting to be discovered in the storage rooms of the modern museums. Lack of money, the present political situation in Iraq and the fact that archaeologists and assyriologists belong to different disciplines, are factors that explain why so many cuneiform tablets remain unpublished. A sorry example is the collection of the Persepolis fortification tablets: their number is estimated at 25,000-30,000 but only 3,000 have been published. Other archives from the Achaemenid and Seleucid age waiting for publication are known from Arbela, Nippur, Borsippa, Sippar, Uruk, Ur and Susa, and it is to be expected that future excavations in the capitals of the Persian satrapies will offer an abundance of new information. It is not much exaggerated to state that those who want to study Alexander, should learn Babylonian or Persian instead of Greek." Quoted from