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Monday, August 26, 2024

Four new Babylonian lunar-omen tablets published

CUNEIFORM LUNAR OMENS: 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 (Times of Israel).

We already knew how omens worked. The point of the underlying article is the publication of these four interesting tablets. The story has been getting some media attention. The article in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies is behind a subscription wall, but you can read the abstract here. Notably:

As products of the middle and late Old Babylonian periods [the tablets] represent the oldest examples of compendia of lunar-eclipse omens yet discovered and thus provide important new information about celestial divination among the peoples of southern Mesopotamia in the early second millennium BCE.
For the possible relevance of Mesopotamian lunar (but not eclipse) omen literature to a famous passage in the Bible, see here.

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