It is hardly more than 100 years since the recovery of Babylonian astronomy, when, as Neugebauer said, “for the first time the words ‘Babylonian astronomy’ became endowed with a concrete meaning, fully comparable to that of ‘Greek astronomy’ enshrined in the Almagest or the Handy Tables.” Since that time, the relatively rapid period of decipherment and exposition of the contents of the Babylonian mathematical astronomy has not been matched by an equally rapid reception of Babylonian materials into the field of the history of science, that is, until relatively recently. By the mid-1960s those historians who continued to find the expression “Babylonian science” problematic and who were reluctant to include the cuneiform astronomical, and certainly the astrological, sources within the history of science were nonspecialists in the ancient Near East, for whom the Mesopotamian texts did not appear to be sufficiently explanatory or theoretical; indeed, their contents were viewed as merely practical or technical, therefore not meeting expectations for “science” then measured by standard western criteria. The fact that the astronomical texts were produced by scribes working within the religious framework of the Late Babylonian temples, and the preponderance of divination and astrology was furthermore seen as symptomatic of a phase before the emergence of science. In some works, the supposed prescientific historical period was found to correspond to a certain cognitive developmental phase as well, termed prelogical or mythopoeic, or the like.