Scholars have finally deciphered 4,000-year-old hieroglyphic tablets found more than 100 years ago in what is now Iraq. The tablets describe a number of lunar eclipses as harbingers of death, destruction, and plague.
Prediction of a King’s Death
The four tablets represent the oldest examples of lunar eclipse omens ever discovered, Andrew George, emeritus professor of Babylonian at the University of London, and Junko Taniguchi, an independent researcher, wrote in a paper recently published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. They said the writers of the tablets used the time of night, the movement of shadows, the date and time of the eclipse to predict the omens in Pompeii.
For example, one omen said that if “the eclipse is obscured from its center at the same time and clears at the same time: a king will die, the destruction of Elam.” Elam was a region in Mesopotamia centered on what is now modern-day Iran.
Another omen says that if “the eclipse begins in the south and then clears: the fall of Subartu and Akkad,” both of which were areas of Mesopotamia at the time.
Another omen is: “A solar eclipse at dusk: it signifies pestilence.”
It is possible that ancient astrologers used past experiences to determine the omens of solar eclipses.
“Some omens may have their origins in real-life experiences—observing an omen followed by disaster,” George says. However, he notes that most omens can be identified through a theoretical system that links eclipse features to various omens.
The cuneiform tablets probably came from Sippar, a prosperous city in what is now Iraq, George said. At the time the tablets were written, the Babylonian Empire was at its height in parts of the region. The tablets were part of the British Museum’s collection from 1892 to 1914 but have not been fully translated until now.
Predicting the future through phenomena in the sky
In Babylon and other parts of Mesopotamia, there was a strong belief that celestial events could predict the future.
People believed that events in the sky were coded signs placed there by the gods as warnings about the future prospects of people on earth, George and Taniguchi wrote in the article.
Kings in ancient Mesopotamia did not rely solely on eclipse omens to predict what was about to happen.
George and Taniguchi write: “If the prophecy involved some threatening omen, such as ‘a king will die’, then a psychic investigation (animal entrails examination) would be conducted to determine whether the king was actually in danger.”
George and Taniguchi write that if animal intestines indicated danger, people believed that they could perform certain rituals to neutralize the bad omen, thereby counteracting the evil forces behind it. So even if the omen was bad, people believed that it could be avoided through prediction.