Ancient Babylonians thought solar eclipses predicted disasters
Deciphering four Mesopotamian tablets, team led by
Assyriologist Andrew George shows Babylonians understood celestial
events as messages from the gods
In total, the newly translated tablets contain 61 such predictions, including a barley shortage, a lion rampage, and a famine so terrible that “people will trade their infant children for silver.”
Ancient Babylonians attributed prescient meaning to celestial events, a study published this month argues, shedding fresh light on the Mesopotamian people of the second millennium BC.
The paper, published in the University of Chicago’s Journal of Cuneiform Studies, says that the people of Babylon — an ancient city in Mesopotamia— viewed solar eclipses as omens predicting an upcoming catastrophe that could come in the form of a natural disaster, military defeat or the death of a king.
“The reading of omens was how the Babylonians made sense of the world,” Andrew George, an esteemed Assyriologist and emeritus professor at the University of London who led the study, told The New York Times.
George’s conclusion was based on his deciphering of four tablets from about 1894 BC to 1595 BC that have been held in the British Museum since the late nineteenth century. The tablets are believed to have originated from Sippar, an ancient city located on the banks of the Euphrates River in what is now Iraq.
“The purpose of the omen texts was to figure out what the gods wanted to communicate, good or bad, so as to take action to avoid any trouble ahead,” George told the Times.
According to George, the tablets record observations of lunar eclipses made by Babylonian astrologers that foretell unwanted occurrences like the death of monarchs, leading rulers to go into hiding and even to sacrifice one of their subjects so that the danger would subside.
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| In total, the newly translated tablets contain 61 such predictions, including a barley shortage, a lion rampage, and a famine so terrible that “people will trade their infant children for silver.” |
“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,” George told the Times. “But it is also possible that the theory was developed entirely by analogy. We cannot know.”
George says the Babylonians believed the cataclysms could be mitigated, or even prevented, by appropriate religious rituals, such as sacrificing a sheep and having a priest evaluate its internal organs. “Basically, the diviner was looking for anything unusual,” George told the Times, such as “deformations, absence of features, doubling of features, splits and grooves in surfaces.”
According to George, the priest would compare the number of distortions on the right and left side of the organ, with the former being considered good and the latter bad, and accordingly make a prediction. If the results were ambiguous, another sheep could be sacrificed.
George proposes that such rituals were a method of keeping rulers in check. “One suspects that some kings were more superstitious, and thus more susceptible to manipulation by diviners than others,” he told the Times. “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.”
Much work remains for Assyriologists like George to fully understand ancient Babylon; most of the approximately 100,000 tablets held by the British Museum remain undeciphered.
“There are too many tablets and not enough Assyriologists,” George told the Times. “Only a tiny fraction of the tablets are on display. One hundred or so public galleries stuffed with cuneiform tablets would excite very few visitors.”