Teucer of Babylon

Teucer of Babylon , also known as Teukros of Babylon, was a Greek-Egyptian Hellenistic astrologer of uncertain date, probably active in or before the first century AD. His name was transmitted in Middle Persian and Arabic in forms including Tinkalūshā, Tinkalūs, Tankalūshā, and, in Persian, Tanglūshā .

He is chiefly known for his treatment of the paranatellonta, the constellations or asterisms that rise together with particular degrees or divisions of the zodiac. His writings became an important source for later Greek, Middle Persian and Arabic astrology.

Identity and date Teucer was most probably of Greek descent and lived in Roman Egypt. The “Babylon” attached to his name is generally identified not with the Mesopotamian city of Babylon, but with Babylon Fortress in Egypt, near modern Cairo.

The date of Teucer is reconstructed from references to, and possible borrowings from, his work. David Pingree concluded that he was used as a source by Vettius Valens and Rhetorius, which would place him in or before the first century AD. The paranatellonta of particular zodiacal degrees, containing traces of hexametrical composition, edited by Boll in Sphaera, pp. 41–52. The surviving material extends from 1° Aries to 18° Aquarius and was critically edited by Hübner, vol. I, pp. 108–127, with commentary in vol. II, pp. 1–93. A second collection of decanal paranatellonta, edited by Stefan Weinstock in the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, vol. IX, part 2 (1953), pp. 180–186. This arrangement considered the 36 decans in relation to the seven traditional planets and may originally have contained 252 sections.

Reflections of these texts also occur in Rhetorius, in a twelfth-century Byzantine astrological poem by John Kamateros, in the Oxford manuscripts conventionally called the Excerpta Barocciana, and in Abu Ma'shar's Great Introduction to Astrology.

Transmission through Middle Persian and Arabic Teucer's work was translated or adapted into Middle Persian, probably during the Sasanian period, and was subsequently translated from Middle Persian into Arabic. In Arabic and Persian sources the author's name appears in several forms, including Tinkalūshā, Tinkalūs, Tanglūshā and Ṭīnfarūs. These variants have been explained as products of the transmission of the Greek name through the ambiguous Pahlavi script.

In the Islamic bibliographical tradition, a work attributed to Tinkalūshā was known as the Kitāb al-wujūh wa-l-ḥudūd (“Book of the Faces and Bounds”).

The original Arabic translation made from Middle Persian appears to be lost, although substantial extracts survived through Abu Ma'shar and other authors. A work entitled Ṣuwar al-daraj wa-l-ḥukm ʿalayhā fīmā tadullu ʿalayhi min ṭawāliʿ al-mawlūdīn, attributed to Tinkalūshā and supposedly translated by Ibn Wahshiyya, has also circulated in Arabic manuscripts. Carlo Alfonso Nallino concluded that this text was a later forgery unrelated to the authentic work of Teucer.

Persian name and literary reception In Persian lexicography, Teucer's transmitted name became Tanglūshā , with related forms such as Tanglūsh and Tinkalūs. Later Persian dictionaries misunderstood the name as a compound consisting of tang, interpreted as a painted book or folio, and Lūshā, supposedly the name of a Roman painter or sage.

This folk etymology generated a legend in which Lūshā was portrayed as a master painter and a counterpart of Mani. His illustrated book, the Tanglūshā, was consequently compared with Mani's celebrated painted book, the Arzhang. Modern scholarship identifies this tradition as a secondary misunderstanding of the transmitted name of Teucer, rather than evidence for a separate painter named Lūshā.

Because Teucer's astrological work contained numerous descriptions of celestial figures, the name Tanglūshā eventually became associated in Persian literature with richly illustrated books and collections of marvelous images. The Persian poets Khaqani and Nizami Ganjavi both referred to the Tanglūshā in this sense. Khaqani compared his own compositions with both the Chinese Arzhang and the Tanglūshā, while Nizami described it as a book of “a hundred thousand images”.

This literary reception illustrates how the name of a technical astrological text was gradually detached from its original author and reinterpreted in Persian culture as the title of a legendary book of pictures.