OnscurE ORIGINS OF HELLENISTIC ASTROLOGY 23 to use it asa critical piece of evidence in terms of dating, but simply to note that it may fall within the same general time frame as the emergence of some of the other early Greek horoscopes. There are also some early horoscopes written in Demotic (a late Egyptian script), with the first dating to May 4, 38 BCE. The rest date to the early first century CE orllater:” The fact that some of these charts were found in collections written by Egyptian priests connected with specific temples has been taken to indicate that astrology became one of the forms of divination that was practiced by the priesthood in Egypt.* Reliably datable charts from Latin sources are surprisingly infrequent in classical antiquity, and the ones that do exist do not begin to appear until after the first century CE.” It should be noted that Holden identified and attempted to date two possible charts in Latin that appear in Firmicus Maternus, which he dated to 139 and 96 BCE.** He speculated that the 139 BCE chart may have been the horoscope of Sulla, an association which Hiibner later explored and endorsed." If true, this chart would be the oldest of any Greek or Latin charts known to have survived. However, we should probably be cautious about using these charts for the purposes of dating the emergence of Hellenistic astrology, because Firmicus is relatively late in the tradition (fourth century CE), and the chart itself may have been rectified by whatever source he gotit from. It appears ina section ofhis book that contains many other hypothetical and rectified chart examples for figures like Homer, Paris of Troy, and Plato. Moreover, Hiibner points out that while the position of Saturn given in the chart matches Sulla’s known year of birth (138 BCE), the positions of the other planets are only correct for the preceding year (139 BCE), which Heilen and Hubner speculate may have been an accidental or deliberate conflation of positions obtained from °% Neugebauer and Parker, “Two Demotic Horoscopes” Cf. Heilen, Hadriani Genitura,p.316. © Heilen, Hadriani Genitura, p. 316f. % Jones, “The Place of Astronomy in Roman Egypt,’ p. 39ff. This inference has been confirmed in recent years due to the discovery of a number of Demotic instructional manuals con astrology that came from a temple in the Egyptian city of Tebtunis, although much of this material has not been published yet. See Winkler, “On the Astrological Papyri from the Tebtunis Temple Library;” and more recently Quack, “On the Concomitancy of the Seemingly Incommensurable;” and Winkler, “Some Astrologers and Their Handbooks in Demotic Egyptian,” esp. pp. 269-278. % For the Latin charts see Heilen, Hadriani Genitura, p. 326-330, although note that he includes a number of hypothetical charts that may have been rectified at a much later date. “© Holden, A History of Horoscopic Astrology, pp. 76-77. There was a typographical error in the original 1996 publication that said 138 BCE, which Holden later corrected to 139 BCE in later editions ofthe book. For the charts see Firmicus, Mathess, 6, 31:1, $8. “\ Habner, “Sulla horoscope? (Firm,, Math. 6,31,1).”