Francesca Rochberg

Francesca Rochberg received a B.A. in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and the Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. She is a member of the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published widely on Babylonian celestial sciences and produced editions of cuneiform texts that set Babylonian science in various contexts, from cultural to cognitive history. Her research on ancient Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman traditions in astronomy and astrology has introduced the evidence of ancient cuneiform science into the philosophy of science through investigations of empiricism, prediction, logic, and reasoning.  She is the author of Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination: The Lunar Eclipse Tablets of Enūma Anu Enlil, Archiv für Orientforschung Beiheft 22(Horn: Ferdinand Berger und Söhne, 1988), Babylonian Horoscopes, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol.88, Pt.1 (American Philosophical Society, 1998), The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge UP, 2004, paperback edition 2007), and In the Path of the Moon: Babylonian Celestial Divination and Its Legacy, Studies in Ancient Magic and Divination (E.J. Brill, 2010).

https://melc.berkeley.edu/people/francesca-rochberg