Four recently translated Babylonian tablets provide insight into the supernatural concerns of those ancient times. The 4,000-year-old clay tablets contain 61 ominous warnings of death, doom and destruction that are sure to follow lunar eclipses. Most of these were dire news to the king of the day.
Andrew George and Junko Taniguchi translated the tablets using artificial intelligence. The tablets were excavated in what is now Iraq over a century ago and have been housed in the British Museum ever since. They were made in the ancient city of Sippar between the 17th and 18th centuries BC. They are the oldest list of signs of a lunar eclipse ever discovered.
Among the dire predictions: A lunar eclipse in the morning “means the end of the dynasty.” One in the evening “means plague.” If an eclipse begins in the south, it predicts the “downfall of Subartu and Akkad” (other regions at that time).
Crazy dogs and locusts
Others warn: “There will be no more rain in the sky,” “a plague of locusts will attack the land,” and “a dog will go mad, and no one it bit will survive.”
Babylonia was part of Mesopotamia and astrology played a major role in its culture. The king’s closest advisors observed the night sky and compared their observations with those in texts about celestial omens.
When the monarch was threatened with a negative prophecy, his advisors would kill animals and use their entrails to decipher the omen. Then rituals would be performed to protect against it.
When things were particularly bad for the king, a substitute king was appointed. He then became the target of God’s wrath and protected the actual king from harm.
“Astrological observation was part of an ingenious method to protect the king and regulate his behavior to conform to the wishes of the gods,” the authors explain in the new study.
Understanding a lunar eclipse
The translated tablets show how important these omens were to the Babylonians. Essentially, they are a set of instructions for understanding a lunar eclipse. Each aspect of the eclipse had a meaning. The time of day, the date, the month, the movement of the shadows, and the duration all signified different omens. Each lunar event was seen as a warning from the gods.
The study suggests that most omens corresponded to people’s experiences. They associated bad events with what they saw happening in the world, or more specifically in the sky.
“Babylonian astrology was an academic branch of divination based on the belief that events in the sky were coded signs placed there by the gods to warn of the future prospects of people on earth,” the authors explained.