The oldest dated manuscript of MUL.APIN was written in 687 BCE, but the work it copies is older: the observations underlying its rising dates point, by modern analysis, to the late second millennium, around 1300 to 1000 BCE, at a latitude consistent with Assyria or Babylonia, and the compendium as a fixed two-tablet series likely reached its standard form around the turn of the millennium. From then it was scribal canon.
Copies survive from Nineveh's royal libraries, from Assur, Babylon, Uruk and other cities across seven centuries, remarkably stable in text, and excerpts and school extracts show it in the curriculum wherever the scribal art was taught. Its practical work was calendrical and divinatory at once: the same lists that told a temple when to intercalate a month told the observers of the omen series Enuma Anu Enlil what the sky ought to do, so that deviation could be read as a signal. In the longer history of science its position is pivotal.
MUL.APIN gathers the pre-mathematical astronomy of Mesopotamia, the stage of named stars, ideal periods and arithmetical schemes, out of which the Late Babylonian astronomers of the last centuries BCE built genuinely predictive mathematical astronomy, and through them Greek astronomy inherited the zodiac's raw material, several constellation figures, and the sexagesimal degree it still uses. The standard modern edition and study, by Hunger and Pingree and their successors, keeps the old reference work in scholarly service.