The book begins with a general overview of the planetary tables, covering the history of research, a comparative analysis of various archaeological, archival, material, and notational aspects, a discussion of regional variations, scribal errors, the production process of the tables, mathematical and astronomical aspects, an overview of the tables arranged by planet and algorithm, and a study of dependencies and offsets between the tables. This is followed by editions of the tablets, including previously unpublished ones. Each commentary includes a full account of the material, archival, paleographic, orthographic, and other features of the tablet, a summary of previous research, and reconstructions of the underlying algorithms, in some cases with significant new insights about the Babylonian methods.
Mathieu Ossendrijver is a historian of ancient science based at the Institute for the History of Knowledge in the Ancient World at Freie Universität Berlin. He is trained as an Assyriologist (PhD Univ. of Tübingen) and astrophysicist (PhD Univ. of Utrecht). His research focuses on Babylonian astral science (astronomy, astrology) and mathematics, institutional and other contextual aspects of Babylonian scholarship, and cross-cultural transformations of knowledge between Babylonia, Egypt and the Greco-Roman world.