Exciting news has broken of the discovery of an ancient observatory site in Baghdad. The discovery was made by the US Army corps of engineers who were searching for Saddam's legendary stock of photon torpedos.
Following on a tip from Sheikh Rattel én-Roul, the former regime's Chief Certified Creative Accountant, the army was excavating under the Hanging Gardens of Baghdad, where the former President used to hang his political opponents and close relatives.
In what was clearly an extensive armoury, the engineers uncovered stocks of weapons. However, the commanding officer, General Jubilation T Cornpone IV said that he seriously doubted that the fifty scythed chariots and the bones of numerous fully equipped war elephants, all dating to circa 650BC, were exactly what the Pentagon had in mind when it had paid out the five million dollars reward money.
He said however that the fact that these weapons contravened the provisions of the treaty of Damascus of 952BC as set out on the stela of Pharaoh Thutmoses I showed a long commitment by the country to weapons of mass destruction.
The most exciting find was in an adjacent building initially thought to contain brass shields and battle gongs but which turned out to be an observatory dating to 600BC. Closer examination showed that two at least of the brass objects were in fact parabolic reflectors one metre in diameter which showed traces of the parabolic surfaces being originally chemically silver plated.
Dehydrated quantities of Lebanon cedar were a mystery until the cuneiform inscriptions and bas-relief representations on a wall of the structure were deciphered and showed that the Babylonians had beaten Newton in the invention of the reflecting telescope by more than two thousand years.
A Babylonian engineer had looked at a curved brass gong through the bottom of a wine bottle made from Egyptian glass and accidentally discovered the secret of the Herschellian telescope. Subsequent experimentation, including silver plating for greater reflectivity and careful placement of King Nebuchadnezzar’s battlefield shaving mirror resulted in the anticipation of the Newtonian telescope.
With a truss tube of Lebanon Cedar, and an alt-azimuth mount based on a horizontal water wheel, serious observations revealed the general nature of the moon, the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus (Ishtar to the Babylonians) and the star-clouds in the Milky Way.
The project had been kept a state secret however owing to its perceived military nature - giving Babylon a competitive edge in astrological forecasting of military intent of the Egyptians, Hittites, Lydians and Ionians.
Thus, the observatory was constructed at a military base at some distance from the city of Babylon, both for security reasons and to get away from the bright lights of Babylon's central business district.
Observations were carried out during the dry summer months when the telescopes could be safely left outdoors for extended periods, from the top of a nearby Ziggurat, while primitive Ramsden-type eyepieces of Egyptian glass set with bitumen in carefully moulded clay cylinders completed the scope. No finderscope was used but simply a sight tube as used on Babylonian ballista and similar torsion field artillery.
Thousands of clay tablets attest to serious observational work being carried out over ninety years, along with astrological forecasts, and these tablets are still being deciphered.