Researchers have deciphered ancient Babylonian tablets that predict future disasters.
The 4,000-year-old artifacts were found more than 100 years ago in present-day Iraq, but have only now been fully translated and linked to astronomical events.
The ancient Babylonians had a special interest in the cosmos, especially the moon, and associated lunar eclipses with natural disasters and historical events.
The newly deciphered tablets consist of 61 predictions spread across four clay tablets, including an ominous warning that “a king will die” and “a nation will fall.”
A 4,000-year-old tablet written by ancient Babylonians contained 61 omens that may have linked past experiences with the alignment of the planets, moon and stars.
Although the tablets were added to the British Museum’s collection between 1892 and 1914, this revelation marks the first time that cuneiform writing has been fully translated and linked to astronomical predictions and omens.
The omens foretold serious environmental disasters, including one that read: “In the spring, a plague of locusts will emerge and attack the crops on my land. There will be a shortage of food.”
There was also talk of revolts on Earth, both from foreign adversaries and from the climate, the study found.
A deciphered omen read: ‘There will be rains and floods and Adad will devastate the eras.
There will be an attack by an Elamite army, a Gutian army, on the land. It will destroy a land that is rebelling. The land will perish.
A separate omen added: ‘As for a land that rebels, the enemy will demolish cities, city walls, walls of my city, the walls of our city.’
The tablets are believed to have come from Sippar, a city that flourished during the Babylonian Empire in what is now Iraq, and date to the middle and late periods of ancient Babylon, from approximately 1894 to 1595 BC.
The researchers suggested that ancient people may have relied on past experiences to determine omens that predicted lunar eclipses and this discovery makes these slabs “the oldest examples of compendia of lunar eclipse omens yet discovered.”
Ancient Babylonians knew when to expect a lunar eclipse and often claimed it foretold the death of their species and performed rituals to save the current monarch from his supposed fate, researchers say.
Researchers worked to decipher cuneiform, which is one of the oldest known forms of writing and means “wedge-shaped” because people used a reed stylus to create wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets.
These symbols could be used to write several languages in the ancient Near East, including Sumerian, Akkadian, and Old Persian.
In Mesopotamia, ancient people associated eclipses with the death of their kings, which led them to study them and make predictions to protect their rulers.
People believed that “events in the sky were coded signs placed there by the gods as warnings about the future prospects of those on Earth,” Andrew George, a professor at the University of London, and his co-author Junko Taniguchi wrote in the study.
‘Those who advised the king monitored the night sky and compared their observations with the scholarly corpus of texts on celestial omens.’
The tablets analyzed in the new study date to the Middle and Late Babylonian periods, from about 1894 to 1595 BCE, and are the “oldest examples of compendia of lunar eclipse omens yet discovered.”
The study revealed that ancient Babylonians predicted omens using the time of night, the date, the movement of shadows and the duration of eclipses, much like a “psychic” uses tarot cards to predict someone’s future.
Researchers said one transcribed omen read: “If an eclipse darkens from its center suddenly (and) becomes suddenly clear: a king will die, destruction of Elam,” a region of Mesopotamia in central present-day Iran.
Another omen predicted the fall of two other regions of Mesopotamia, Subartu and Akkad, which would occur if “an eclipse begins in the south and then disappears.”
Researchers said the omens could cause people to take drastic measures to protect their leader, noting that one said: ‘A king who is famous will perish; his son who has not been nominated/appointed to the kingship, will take the kingship/throne and there will be war.
‘The land will become desolate, its cities will become desolate, and its soil will dwindle.’
However, researchers noted that kings did not rely solely on eclipse omens; if someone predicted their death, they took additional steps to confirm whether a tragedy would occur.
“If the prediction associated with a given omen was threatening, for example, ‘a king will die,’ then an oracular investigation was conducted using extispicia (inspection of the entrails of animals) to determine whether the king was in real danger,” the study notes.
If the entrails confirmed that a calamity was approaching, the ancient Babylonians believed that by performing certain rituals they could nullify the bad omen and overcome the evil that surrounded them.
Lunar omens typically predicted the death of a king and according to POTThe Babylonians sometimes appointed “substitute kings…who would bear the brunt of the gods’ wrath” to protect the true ruler from harm.
Although the deaths of some kings have not been definitively linked to the tablet’s omens, one historical leader seemed to live up to some of the omens.
‘A king who is famous will perish; his son who has not been appointed to the throne will seize the throne and there will be war,’ said one omen, adding: ‘The land will be depopulated, its cities will become a desolation and its land will diminish.’
In 1750 BC, King Hammurabi died at about the age of 60, and although his ancestors ruled for another 155 years, his death marked the slow decline of the Babylonian Empire.
“The origins of some of the omens may have been in a real experience: the observation of an omen followed by a catastrophe,” George said. Living science.
But he clarified that most of the omens were probably related to eclipse events from a theoretical or speculative point of view.