DIVINATION AND WRITING
The hermeneutic sensitivity that characterizes the Babylonian and Assyrian text commentaries of the first millennium derived from a long tradition of divinatory interpretation. From early on, Mesopotamian scholars believed that the gods left signs on the exta of the sacrificial animal, in the life of plants, the behavior of animals, the movement of heavenly bodies, and in dreams.[48] These signs reminded them in many respects of the signs of the cuneiform writing system.
The scholars regarded nature as a book, or rather a tablet, that could be read by those who knew the underlying code.[49] Haruspices occasionally called the liver a “tablet of the gods” (tuppu sa ill) and claimed that the signs they were able to detect on it were “written” on it by the sun-god Samas (Starr 1983: 30, lines 16-17; 53-57). Astrologers spoke of the “writing of the firmament” (sitir same, sitir burume) when referring to the starry sky from which they took their forecasts (see CAD S/3, 146a).[50] Not surprisingly, then, there are cases in the Mesopotamian textual record in which the starting point for a divinatory quest was the observation, on objects of various types, of writing in its most literal sense, that is, of individual or multiple cuneiform signs.References to written messages of a certain length that were deemed to have divinatory relevance occur in a few Mesopotamian dream reports. Two passages from inscriptions of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal can serve as examples. In the first, Assurbanipal writes that a man,
[on the tablet]) in Akkadian (only once, in the Aa 16 commentary BM 41286, ittu seems to be used in this context; see MSL 14, 323-26) and gu-sum (“soundgiver”) in Sumerian (see CAD I/J, 306-08, M/2, 54). It is also noteworthy that pisru, the terminus technicus for the interpretation provided for an ominous phenomenon in the apodosis of an omen entry (Parpola 1983: 40), is never used to label Mesopotamian text commentaries, which are called satu, mukallimtu, or multdbiltu instead. This is all the more remarkable as in later Semitic cultures, terms for text commentaries such as Hebrew peser and Arabic tafsir are actually derived from the root psr.
while dreaming, saw a cult pedestal of Sin on which was written that the moon-god would persecute and destroy all the enemies of the king who refused to submit to him (Borger 1996: 40-41, 233).18 In the second passage, Assurbanipal claims that the Lydian king Gyges sent messengers to him after he had seen the Assyrian king’s “name” (nibit sumi), apparently in some written form, in a dream (Borger 1996: 30-31, 218).19 Both episodes are reminiscent of the famous “writing on the wall” in the Belshazzar story of the Bible, even though the latter does not feature dreams.20
The “texts” in the dream reports communicated by Assurbanipal are straightforward and non-enigmatic, quite in contrast to another type of script-related divination: the references in treatises on extispicy and physiognomy to features in the shape of cuneiform signs that were observed by experts on the exta of the sacrificial lamb or the body of a human being.
My goal in the following sub-sections is to collect these references and to analyze the principles underlying the links between the protases referring to specific graphemes and the predictions based on their occurrence.21 We have seen that Babylonian and Assyrian text commentaries often deduce new meanings from secondary values of cuneiform signs, and such an “etymo- graphical” approach is what we would expect to find as the main rationale of omen entries mentioning cuneiform signs as well. But a closer look at the evidence, first from extispicy and then from physiognomic omens, will demonstrate that the situation is, in fact, somewhat less straightforward.For the convenience of readers not acquainted with the cuneiform writing system, the Old Babylonian forms of the signs discussed in the following sub-sections are reproduced in figure 7.1.