Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid

Author:Moudhy Al-Rashid [Al-Rashid, Moudhy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient, General, Asia, Middle East, Mesopotamia, Published: 20-Feb-2025
ISBN: 9781529392159
Google: mPAO0AEACAAJ
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2025-02-19T22:00:00+00:00

The sky was not the only divine clay tablet that gods could use to inscribe their signs onto. They could also choose the far more gruesome tableau of a dead sheep’s entrails, and this type of divination – known as extispicy – belonged to an entirely different but complementary discipline, which was still scientific in its methods. Among the types of scholars whose careers hinged on their ability to read those signs was the diviner, or bārû, which literally means ‘one who sees’, or ‘seer’. Unlike the astronomers we have met so far, such professional seers didn’t need to wait for Venus to move or an eclipse to appear. They could provoke answers from the gods to questions posed by clients, including queens and kings, through the entrails of a sheep.

To provide an answer about a client’s future, the seer would whisper a straightforward yes or no question (Should I journey to Babylon? Will my pregnant wife live?) into the ear of the living sheep before ritually slaughtering it. In the time between asking the question and carrying out the killing, the god Shamash would have written an answer on the sheep’s liver and intestines in cryptic ‘writing’ that only a diviner was trained to read. As celestial phenomena were sometimes called ‘the heavenly writing’, so the sheep’s liver was sometimes called ‘tablet of the gods’.

That writing took the form of unique features on parts of the liver that had arcane names like ‘the Path’ and ‘the Presence’, which are lobes of the organ where it borders the stomach. ‘The Finger’ is a band of tissue that separates two other lobes of the liver, and ‘the gall bladder’ is, mercifully, the gall bladder. Whether such features were present or absent carried special meaning, and some could bear particular marks, like being split or firm or bulging; any one of these things carried divine meaning. When learning how to carry out these readings, or ‘take’ an omen, trainee diviners relied on clay models of livers with these various parts labelled, similar to how medical students today are trained to know highly technical terminology for the human body. They also consulted lists of omens that pair features of the liver with possible outcomes, just like Enuma Anu Enlil did with astronomical phenomena and events on earth. ‘If the Presence is covered by a membrane,’ reads one such ominous prophecy, ‘the king will contract a serious illness.’43 While omens like this one may sound bizarre to a modern audience, they formed part of a momentous heart-to-heart between a highly trained seer and an attentive deity. The liver provided an organic clay tablet, in a sense, on which the gods could impress their answers to the initial yes or no question posed. The gods took the time to ‘write’ on the different areas of the liver – the gall bladder, the Presence, the Path – but that writing was far from straightforward to read and required an indirect, but systematic approach to its interpretation.

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