"It is worth quoting Anthony Grafton’s summation of Scaliger’s assault on the prisca theologia presumptions of his contemporaries here, as Scaliger’s position strongly foreshadows the nineteenth-century philhellenist view of cultural relations in the ancient world: “In astronomy and astrology, it had been the Greeks, not the Babylonians and the Egyptians, who performed most of the observations and, above all, tabulated and systematized the results. The ancient Near East had been not a world of gold, populated by calm sages, but a world of iron, haunted by superstitious fears and only fitfully illuminated by the work of certain science- minded priests — themselves prone to spin out unfounded speculations.”’"