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199 ing them from past experience what a phenomenon’s oracu- lar meaning was: When the Moon in its calculated time is not seen: There will be an invasion of a mighty city. When a comet reaches the path of the Sun: Field-flow will be diminished, an uproar will happen twice. When Jupiter goes with Venus: The prayers of the land will reach the gods. As time went on, the reports were increasingly of observa- tions accompanied by the omen-priests’ own interpretations: “In the night Saturn came near to the Moon. Saturn is a planet of the Sun. This is the meaning: It is favorable to the king.” The noticeable change included the paying of particu- lar attention to eclipses; a tablet (now in the British Museum), listing computerlike columns of numbers, served to predict lunar eclipses fifty years in advance. Modern studies have concluded that the change to the new style of topical astronomy took place in the eighth century B.C.E. when, after a period of mayhem and royal upheavals in Babylon and Assyria, the two lands’ fates were placed in new and strong royal hands: Tiglath-Pileser II] (745-727 B.c.£.) in Assyria and Nabunassar (747-734 B.c.£.) in Babylonia. Nabunassar (“By Nabu protected”) was hailed, already in antiquity, as an innovator and powerhouse in the field of as- tronomy. One of his first actions was to repair and restore the temple of Shamash in Sippar, the Sun-god’s “cult center” in ancient Sumer. He also built a new observatory in Babylon, updated the calendar (a heritage from Nippur), and instituted daily reporting to the king of the celestial phenomena and their meaning. It was primarily due to those measures that a wealth of astronomical data, shedding light on subsequent events, has come to light. Tiglath-Pileser III was also active, in his own ways. His Darkness at Noon