Jastrow also perpetuates the idea that astronomy began with the Greeks.  “Several centuries before the days of Alexander the Great,” he says, “the Greeks had begun to cultivate the study of the heavens, not for purposes of divination, but prompted by a scientific spirit as an intellectual discipline that might help them to solve the mysteries of the universe.”  It is possible, however, to overrate the “scientific spirit” of the Greeks, who, like the Japanese in our own day, were accomplished borrowers from other civilizations.  That astronomy had humble beginnings in Greece as elsewhere is highly probable.  The late Mr. Andrew Lang wrote in this connection:  “The very oddest example of the survival of the notion that the stars are men and women is found in the Pax of Aristophanes.  Trygaeus in that comedy has just made an expedition to heaven.  A slave meets him, and asks him:  ’Is not the story true, then, that we become stars when we die?’ The answer is, ‘Certainly’; and Trygaeus points out the star into which Ion of Chios has just been metamorphosed.”  Mr. Lang added:  “Aristophanes is making fun of some popular Greek superstition”.  The Eskimos, Persians, Aryo-Indians, Germans, New Zealanders, and others had a similar superstition.[345]

Jastrow goes on to say that the Greeks “imparted their scientific view of the Universe to the East.  They became the teachers of the East in astronomy as in medicine and other sciences, and the credit of having discovered the law of the precession of the equinoxes belongs to Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer, who announced this important theory about the year 130 B.C."[346] Undoubtedly the Greeks contributed to the advancement of the science of astronomy, with which, as other authorities believe, they became acquainted after it had become well developed as a science by the Assyrians and Babylonians.

“In return for improved methods of astronomical calculation which,” Jastrow says, “it may be assumed (the italics are ours), contact with Greek science gave to the Babylonian astronomers, the Greeks accepted from the Babylonians the names of the constellations of the ecliptic."[347] This is a grudging admission; they evidently accepted more than the mere names.

Jastrow’s hypothesis is certainly interesting, especially as he is an Oriental linguist of high repute.  But it is not generally accepted.  The sudden advance made by the Tigro-Euphratean astronomers when Assyria was at the height of its glory, may have been due to the discoveries made by great native scientists, the Newtons and the Herschels of past ages, who had studied the data accumulated by generations of astrologers, the earliest recorders of the movements of the heavenly bodies.  It is hard to believe that the Greeks made much progress as scientists before they had identified the planets, and become familiar with the Babylonian constellations through the medium of the Hittites or the Phoenicians.  What is known for certain is that long centuries before the Greek science was heard of, there were scientists in Babylonia.  During the Sumerian period “the forms and relations of geometry”, says Professor Goodspeed, “were employed for purposes of augury.  The heavens were mapped out, and the courses of the heavenly bodies traced to determine the bearing of their movements upon human destinies."[348]