Star Tours #1: Al Lul

On a spaceship called the Interstella, a guide named Rochelle uses a laser pointer to connect the dots of the constellation Al Lul, which the ancient Mesopotamians saw not as a crab but as a turtle. This is the opening scene of the first episode in a seven-part series that blends science fiction with ancient star lore. The episode’s central question is how the night sky was interpreted by the earliest civilizations, specifically the Sumerians and Babylonians, whose five-thousand-year-old astrological records still shape how we see the constellations today.

The Ancient Roots of the Zodiac

The journey begins by grounding the listener in the historical context of the stars they are about to see. As the Interstella hovers over the Middle East, the narrator explains that the Babylonians and Sumerians produced some of the oldest known astronomical records, including star catalogues from around 1200 BCE. These tablets contained observations, astrological predictions, and mythological stories with symbolic ties to the cosmos. The Western zodiac’s twelve symbols are directly based on the Babylonian system, which originally had seventeen or eighteen symbols before being simplified by the Greeks and Egyptians. The constellation Al Lul, known in English as Cancer, may have been confused with the Babylonian word allutu (“pinces”), but in ancient times it was associated with a tu