The chief point in dispute, over which great controversy has taken place recently among German scholars, is as to the antiquity of both astronomical knowledge and astrological doctrine, including astral theology, among the dwellers in the Tigris-Euphrates region. Briefly, such writers as Winckler, Stücken, and Jeremias held that the religion of the early Babylonians was largely based on astrology and that all their thought was permeated by it, and that they had probably by an early date made astronomical observations and acquired astronomical knowledge which was lost in the decline of their culture. Opposing this view, such scholars as Kugler, Bezold, Boll, and Schiaparelli have shown the lack of certain evidence for either any considerable astronomical knowledge or astrological theory in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley until the late appearance of the Chaldeans. It is even denied that the seven planets were distinguished in the early period, much less the signs of the zodiac or the planetary week,[59] which last, together with any real advance in astronomy, is reserved for the Hellenistic period. [Sidenote: The number seven in early Babylonia.] Yet the prominence of the number seven in myth, religion, and magic is indisputable in the third millennium before our era. For instance, in the old Babylonian epic of creation there are seven winds, seven spirits of storms, seven evil diseases, seven divisions of the underworld closed by seven doors, seven zones of the upper world and sky, and so on. We are told, however, that the staged towers of Babylonia, which are said to have symbolized for millenniums the sacred Hebdomad, did not always have seven stages.[60] But the number seven was undoubtedly of frequent occurrence, of a sacred and mystic character, and virtue and perfection were ascribed to it. And no one has succeeded in giving any satisfactory explanation for this other than the rule of the seven planets over our world. This also applies to the sanctity of the number seven in the Old Testament[61] and the emphasis upon it in Hesiod, the Odyssey, and other early Greek sources.[62] [Sidenote: Incantation texts older than the astrological.] However that may be, the tendency prevailing at present is to regard astrology as a relatively late development introduced by the Semitic Chaldeans. Lenormant held that writing and magic were a Turanian or Sumerian (Accadian) contribution to Babylonian civilization, but that astronomy and astrology were Semitic innovations. Jastrow thinks that there was slight difference between the religion of Assyria and that of Babylonia, and that astral theology played a great part in both; but he grants that the older incantation texts are less influenced by this astral theology. L. W. King says, “Magic and divination bulk largely in the texts recovered, and in their case there is nothing to suggest an underlying astrological element.”[63] [Sidenote: Other divination than astrology.]