A study of Babylonian planetary theory. III: The planet Mercury (Q822757)

After studies on the Babylonian ``theories'' of the motion of the outer planets [ibid. 73, No. 1, 1--37 (2019; Zbl 1411.01013)] and of Venus [ibid. 73, No. 4, 309--333 (2019; Zbl 1411.01014)], the author, in this article, turns his attention to texts about the phenomena of Mercury. The observations of Mercury as preserved in the \textit{Astronomical diaries} have particular shortcomings: they do not record stations, which are almost impossible to observe; stars are rarely observable near the dates of first or last appearance of Mercury; about one out of every seven pairs of first and last appearances is said to be ``omitted'' when Mercury cannot be observed because of the low inclination of its orbit to the horizon and atmospheric extinction. Babylonian astronomers nevertheless succeeded in constructing computational schemes for the dates and longitudes of first and last appearances of Mercury, along the lines of schemes for the Moon, called System A by modern scholars. The times and distances between successive phenomena of the planets vary depending on where in the zodiac they occur. This variation is approximated by stepwise constant amplitudes for the differences between these successive phenomena. To develop these schemes the Babylonians used long periods of several hundred years which they constructed from linear combinations of the observed periods. The variation of the time interval between similar phenomena of the planets, e.g. first appearances, can be based on the dates found in the observational texts. The interval in longitude is, in the case of Mercury, difficult to determine since there are almost no observations of stars possible at the planet's first or last appearances. To fit the computational model to the phenomena of Mercury would require extended calculations in a trial and error process. The author suggests that the Babylonians applied an alternative method using three consecutive synodic arcs. On average, three synodic arcs amount to \(342.6^\circ\), so that the longitudes of every third synodic event decrease by \(360^\circ - 342.6^\circ = 17.4^\circ\). Models based on synodic phenomena of Mercury three intervals apart would have been easier to fit to observations. There is a fragmentary text preserved that arranges longitudes of Mercury at intervals of three appearances which may show an actual application of the proposed method.