Ancient Tablets Foretold Doom Awaiting Babylonian Kings

The idea was that earth and sky were mirror images, so happenings in the heavens had counterparts on land. Which is why an eclipse of the sun or moon signaled that a great terrestrial figure would, in some way, be eclipsed: For instance, a king would die. “It is possible that this theory arose from the coincidence of an eclipse and a king’s death — that is, actual experience early in Mesopotamian history,” Dr. George said. “But it is also possible that the theory was developed entirely by analogy. We cannot know.”

The Babylonians saw portents everywhere, which accounts for numerous references in the tablets to the flight and behavior of birds, the patterns made by dropping oil into water, smoke rising from incense burners and encounters with snakes, pigs, cats and scorpions. There are 61 predictions on the newly-translated tablets that vary from warnings about natural disasters (“An inundation will come and reduce the amount of barley at the threshing floors”) to unnatural chaos (“Lions will go on a rampage and cut off exit from a city”). The most poignant predictions describe desperation in time of famine: “People will trade their infant children for silver.”

Performing the appropriate ritual, the Babylonians believed, could stop, or at least mitigate, a dire omen and alter the future. If an omen was especially threatening, a priest would conduct an oracular inquiry by ritually sacrificing a sheep and reading its entrails. The main internal organs examined were the liver, the lungs and the colonic spiral. “Basically, the diviner was looking for anything unusual,” Dr. George said, including “deformations, absence of features, doubling of features, splits and grooves in surfaces.”

Typically, features that appeared on the right side were considered to be positive and on the left, to be negative, though what constituted right and left differed in each region of Babylonia. The priest would then tally the results, which, if ambiguous, might necessitate another sacrifice.

Arguably, all divination at the state level in Babylonia became a tool to regulate the king’s behavior and a way those close to the ruler exercised political power over him. “One suspects that some kings were more superstitious, and thus more susceptible to manipulation by diviners than others,” Dr. George said. “Since lunar eclipses were, by their nature, ill portents for the king, the omens attached to them spoke to his deepest anxieties about what catastrophes might happen to him and his people.”