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Sagan attacks the ancient astronomers by proclaiming, In fact, sloppy quantitative thinking appears to be the hallmark of this whole subject. . (63)  Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in their book Hamlet's Mill, having made years of extensive study and analysis of ancient astronomy, make clear the view that speculation of the kind in which Sagan indulges is of little value.   They state ...it is an unsound approach to Mayan astronomy [or any ancient astronomy] to start from preconceived convictions about what the Maya's [or other ancients] could have known and what they could not have known: one should, instead, draw conclusion only from the data as given.  That this had to be stressed explicitly reveals the steady decline of scientific ethics . (64)  Santillana accuses scholars like Sagan of having cultivated a pristine ignorance of astronomical thought . (64a)  Sagan's method of dealing with this evidence as given from ancient astronomy by labeling it sloppy is not science; it is name calling, nothing more. There is furthermore exact measured evidence that supports the conclusion that the motion of the Moon, from which we derive the length of the month, prior to 687 was different than it is today.  In Benjamin Farrington's book Science in Antiquity (London 1969), pages 12 and 13 we find, A most impressive application of mathematics to astronomy is supported by a tablet found in the library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh.  The library belongs to the middle of the seventh century, but the document may be itself much older or a copy of an older document.  It is an attempt to tabulate the progress of the illumination of the surface of the Moon during its period of waxing.  To this end the area of the Moon's face is divided into 240 parts over which the illumination is conceived as spreading first according to a geometrical, then to an arithmetic progression.  This arrangement does not correspond to the [present day] facts of how long the Moon waxes. The question is, were the Babylonian astronomers careful and accurate observers? Arthur Koestler states in his book The Sleepwalkers ,(N.Y. 1963), pages 20-21 that the Babylonian, ...observations became amazingly precise:  they computed the length of the year with a deviation of less than 0.001 percent from the correct value, and their figures relating to the motions of Sun and Moon have only three times the margin of error of nineteenth century astronomers armed with mammoth telescopes.  In this respect, theirs was an Exact Science; their observations were verifiable, and enabled them to make precise predictions of astronomical events...  Measuring and calculating how long it takes the Moon to go from new Moon to full Moon is an observation which the Babylonians made precisely using geometry and mathematics to explain the observation.  But they say the Moon's period of waxing is different than that observed today.  This means that the length of the month was different than that of the present time.  However, because this careful measurement does not agree with the notion of uniformitarian astronomy in which no significant change is possible it is again disregarded.  On the other hand, if this measurement were to agree with present theory, no doubt we would hear how well modern theory is supported by ancient observation. Furthermore, Velikovsky citing an expert on ancient astronomy