Nineveh, at the centre of what was Babylonia, was once the epicentre of world knowledge. It was here that the Minoans could have pursued their understanding of the heavens to sacred levels.
The ancient mounds and ruins lie at the crossing of the Tigris and the Khosr rivers, near the modern-day Iraqi town of Mosul. The ‘exceeding great city’, as it is called in the biblical Book of Jonah, lay on the eastern bank of the Tigris in what was ancient Assyria. It was here that the great Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, had his palace and a library of world renown. He had managed the impossible: uniting the two traditions of Mesopotamia – war and words – within one culture. His significance for me was that he had put together a collection of much older astronomical and scientific texts. This was sacred knowledge, all of which he had ordered to be collected together from all over Mesopotamia, not least from the already ancient cities of Babylon, Uruk, and Nippur.
The Enuma Anu Enlil tablets, preserved for posterity by Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, are full of astronomical events that successions of Babylonian peoples and their kings had been charting, documenting and collecting for many generations.
My theory that Minoan ships could cross the Atlantic depended on one thing: navigation.
From my initial investigations into ancient records I had a strong feeling that the Babylonians had found a way of establishing longitude as far back as 1300 BC. And that their Minoan trading partners would have shared that knowledge.
Further reading:
Ninevah: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/415684/Nineveh
Enuma Anu Enlil 17.2
http://www.pothos.org/content/index.php?page=astronomical-diaries
J. Fermor and J.M. Steele, ‘The Design of Babylonian Waterclocks: Astronomical and Experimental Evidence:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1034/j.1600-0498.2000.420303.x/abstract
J.M. Steele and F.R. Stephenson, ‘Lunar eclipse times predicted by the Babylonians’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 28 (1997)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1997JHA….28..119S
J.M. Steele, ‘The Accuracy of Eclipse Times Measured by the Babylonians’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 28 (1997)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1997JHA….28..337S
N.M. Swerdlow, The Babylonian Theory of the Planets, Princeton
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691011966/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=gavinnet06-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=0691011966
Antikythera mechanism: Nature, vol. 468, pages 496–498, 2010:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7119/abs/nature05357.html
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101124/full/468496a.html
