The Writing on the Wall

Omens were an extremely popular way of trying to tell the future throughout the existence of Babylonian culture. The time and attention of many clever men and women were spent in this way.

A large number of cuneiform tablets dealing with omens have been found in ancient archives. On the shelves of Ashurbanipal’s famous library collected at Nineveh in the middle of the seventh century B.C., volumes dealing with omens took up far more space than stories about Gilgamesh or the creation of the world, although the omens are not as well-known today as these other stories. But the effort devoted to compiling, copying and explaining these omen collections was enormous.

Almost anything could be an omen, a sign from the gods, to guide the pious: the movements of animals, freak births, dreams, patterns of smoke rising or of oil poured on water, the motions of heavenly bodies. (Some of these omens have descendants that are still with us—in the signs of the Zodiac and in popular customs such as looking at the patterns made by tea leaves at the bottom of a teacup.) Babylonian experts noted events they thought were meaningful and listed them by class, making compilations that run into thousands of lines. Omens could be for good or for ill. Signs reported before a defeat or a famine or a tragedy of any sort indicated that another disaster was going to occur if those omens were seen again. Likewise, good might be foretold by the recurrence of unusual phenomena observed before victories, bumper harvests or other prosperous times.^b