In everyday life and for (inter)national issues as well, Neo-Assyrian kings were eager to hear or read their scholars’ reports and interpretations of omens.

The royal letters and archives found at Nineveh give an idea about the Sargonid rulers’ need to look for signs and understand their interpretations about matters of uttermost importance, such as the management of their state and their personal well-being.

What status was conferred to divination and oracles at the Neo-Assyrian court, and to what extent did the signs sent by gods have a decision-making value? From the end of the nineteenth century A.D. until the thirties of the twentieth century, when ancient sources about Greek, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian magic began to emerge and to be (often reluctantly^{1 *}) edited, the finest debate among historians of religions and philologists was the opposition, or the relationship, of religion, science, and magic. Today we find these questions rather outdated, but we have to acknowledge that our will to classify and sort out ancient concepts may be misleading if we use our modern definitions and standards. Classification is indeed helpful in order to understand our ancient records, but it should be considered no more than an organizing tool.

As A. Annus put it,² the disciplines labeled as sciences during one period in history for one civilization will be considered as a blend of science and superstition by their followers or even by outsiders of their time, just as we are always someone else’s best pagan or heretic. Our modern Western definition of science being irrelevant to ancient history, the appropriate issue is: what status is given to a discipline (our concern being divination, oracles, and any signs forecasting future) within a society (Mesopotamian civilization) during a certain period in history (Neo-Assyrian period)?

At the Neo-Assyrian court, the five disciplines of Assyrian wisdom, based on religious and metaphysical concepts, are represented by a chief scholar, the ummanu, and his assistants: the asiputu or “exorcistic lore,” the asutu or “medicine, therapy,” the barutu or “divination, extispicy,” the kalutu or “science of lamentations,” and tupsarrutu or “science of the scribes,” that is, astrology. In a sense, in our modern view, these disciplines were made up of religion, science, and superstition, since they all relied on the same faith (the henotheistic theology

of Assur, blended with the deep-rooted Mesopotamian religious system in general), since they recorded observable evidence and analyzed facts, and since they acquired some of their interpretations of facts on common beliefs.

Should an apotropaic ritual, a therapy, an omen, or a lament turn out to be false or unsuc­cessful, it seldom brought a questioning about the validity of these disciplines. Failures were attributed to a lack of the scholars’ skill, to a flaw in the ritual or to a god’s will.³ In every human system of knowledge, individuals need to stick to the social construction of reality, where the authority of a “brute fact,” in J. Searle’s words,⁴ is equivalent to a self-referential or “institutional” fact.

When it comes down to studying the concept of knowledge and the systems of ideas in antiquity, we must analyze ancient sources to find out whether a discipline, whatever sys­tems it relies on, begets a triple validation by a given society, that is, political, social, and psychological supports. If an ancient discipline obtains this validation, we can consider it mutatis mutandis a “science” in its broadest sense, that is, a knowledge or a practice relying on a system. From an Assyrian point of view then, the five disciplines mentioned above were sciences, because kings, scholars, and people back them up, giving them a triple validation. In the correspondence and scholarly reports of the Neo-Assyrian kings, we find many evidences that these disciplines had the highest status and influenced political decisions, warfare, royal ideology, and theology. The status of divination and oracles, the discipline of interpreting and asking for signs, had thus the status of a science due to the triple support of the Assyrian society.