51 Gebhard J. Selz THE TABLET WITH ‚HEAVENLY WRITING’, OR HOW TO BECOME A STAR 1 Almost 20 years ago I dedicated an article entitled “Der sogenannte ‘gelügelte Tempel’ und die ‘Himmelfahrt’ der Herrscher” to the memory of another great Italian scholar, the late Luigi Cagni (Selz 2000) 2 . The following lines are topically related and I ofer them here to Salvo (De Meis) as a small token of admiration and gratitude. 0. In Classical Antiquity and even beyond the Middle Ages Mesopotamia was remembered as the cradle of astronomy / astrology. From the Neo-Assyrian to the Seleucid times so many important astronomical works do survive that this notion seems generally correct and justiied. A prominent role in the transmission and popularizing of these concepts can be attributed to the Enochic traditions of the Near East, and speciically to what has recently so aptly been labelled as the “Enochic Chronotope” 3 . The notion of the heavenly writing and of a (divine) scribe is also well-known from the post-cuneiform tradition 4 . 1 For the revision of this paper’s English I am most grateful to Judith Pitzner. Besides explicit the references, abbreviations and the labelling of primary sources follow the usual Assyriological practice and the Oxford Electronic Corpus of Sumerian Literary Texts (ECTSL). For this paper – as far as primary sources are concerned – I widely used transcription and translation of ECTSL. 2 The article was submitted to the editor 1997. 3 Such was the title of a conference organized by Florentina Badalanova-Geller (The Enochic Chronotope. Comprehending Immaterial Causes and Physical Space: an Apocryphal Discourse) from 17 th to 19 th of December 2013 at Topoi House Dahlem, Berlin. The present article has loose connections to my conference contribution which will appear as “Enoch, the noted scribe and the Tablet of Destinies” (working title). 4 Rochberg 2004: 294 refers to Plotin. For the later periods, especially the issue of the rulers’ solarization, see now Frahm 2013 and his discussion of the Assyrian kings being the ṣalmu of the Sun- god: “Calling the Assyrian king a ṣalmu of Šamaš implies that his solar aspects possessed a degree of reality that went signiicantly beyond the realm of the merely metaphorical. Some textual references