Chapter 2 discusses chief trends in the history of science that established cultural and pluralist approaches to science and which are essential to integrating the cuneiform scientific textual culture within the history of science proper.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by discussing the intersection of Assyriology and the history of science. This chapter defines the cuneiform scribal-scholarly knowledge termed ṭupšarrūtu in Akkadian as a basis for understanding the scope and character of cuneiform science.

Two strands of intellectual revisionism were essential to the project of this book, which set out to connect our historiography of the cuneiform sciences to an anthropology of science. The first was the rise of pluralism within the history of science, most famously but not exclusively represented by Thomas Kuhn, and the second was a more recent development, the “quiet revolution” within anthropology of the ontological turn.

Chapter 4 brings ideas from philosophy, the philosophy of science, and anthropology concerning the debate over worldviews (conceptual schemes) on the one hand and the plurality of worlds on the other. It takes up conceptual and ontological relativism as it pertains to the history of early sciences and the world(s) to which they referred.

Chapter 3 analyzes the contribution of three prominent historians of science in the mid twentieth century who shaped the modern historiography of the ancient astronomical sciences. Its objective is to expose fundamental philosophical and historiographical underpinnings to the writing of the history of science in antiquity.

Chapter 6 elucidates the concept of “world” in the cuneiform corpus. This chapter is meant as an alternative to the reconstruction of a cosmology in the sense of a systematic account of the physical universe and argues that worldmaking serves better as a heuristic for non-Western premodern systems of knowledge than does the idea of cosmology.

Chapter 7 looks at the question of the spherical world picture and the lack of evidence for such an image of the heavens or of the world as a whole in cuneiform sources.

The material of central interest to this book belongs to the ancient historical world of the Middle East, specifically to what I have previously and continue to classify as science in Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform texts. Cuneiform texts were my point of departure, but they led me down an unexpected path for the historiography of premodern science in the direction of the anthropology of science. As a consequence, in contrast to previous emphases on historical epistemologies reflected in historical bodies of knowledge, my interest shifts here to historical ontologies reflected in the worlds of the scribal compilers and practitioners of those bodies of knowledge. The shift in emphasis toward ontology, I will argue, can be theorized in terms of worldmaking, best approached by means of an anthropology of premodern science.