HISTORICAL OMENS
Both Mesopotamian Prophecies fall into a broader category of what one might term historical omens. Already in extispicy manuals from the Old Babylonian period, apodoses occasionally take the form: “omen of king so and so.” These apodoses refer to real or imagined historical events that are alleged to have been predicted by various irregularities in the exta.
comparisons due to terminological walls may seriously impede understanding, introduce non-existent contradictions, and make the answering of certain questions essentially impossible.
Therefore, Assyrio- logical euphemisms for Mesopotamian prophetic texts will not be employed here. For similar arguments for the use of “prophet” for Mesopotamian practitioners of prophecy but with continuation of “Literary predictive texts” for the Uruk and Dynastic Prophecies, see Nissinen 2004 and 2003. It is understandable that Nissinen wishes to make a distinction between a message from God actually delivered directly from the mouth of a living person (also attested from ancient Mesopotamia) and something which makes predictions and recommends behavior but which was, from its inception, a written composition. Texts like the Uruk and Dynastic Prophecies were not, however, generated “by the book” — there was no manual for deciding what historical event was ominous in this particular way. Their composition required expertise (science), to be sure (a knowledge of history or at least access to historical texts), but they also required inspiration (art), making them closer to prophecy in the broadest sense than to divination. Why not simply create sub-categories within the designation “prophecy” to reflect the potentially significant differences between oral and written forms of the phenomenon?For Mesopotamians, all sorts of everyday occurrences had potentially ominous significance, so it is hardly surprising that at some point significant historical events began to acquire predictive value in their own right, which brings us to the Uruk Prophecy.
In the Uruk Prophecy, a sequence of eleven kings appears, all but three of whom are specifically said to be bad. In every case, the kings in question are not named but simply described as “a king will arise.” King 1 is described as being from the Sealand (that is, a Chaldean) and ruling in Babylon. Chaldean King 2 is supposed to have taxed Uruk to the point of utter ruin. His major crime, however, was that he stole a statue of a divinity described as the old protective goddess of Uruk and took her to Babylon. All was not well in the land until the goddess was finally returned by Good King 10. King 11 was the son of King 10 and the probable original directee of the prophecy. He will also be a good king, rule the four quarters, and produce a dynasty that lasts forever.
I have argued elsewhere that the goddess in question was Nanaya, who was “stolen” by kings of Babylon, carried off to Elam, and then “rescued” for Uruk by Assyrian king Assurbanipal, the Good King 10 of the prophecy (Scurlock 2006). Thus, the description of a series of historical events as if they were not past but about to happen in the future utilizing the formula: “a king will arise” served to “predict” the sequence Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Assurbanipal by way of prophesying the return of the original statue of the goddess Nanaya to her home in Uruk.
Nabopolassar, a Chaldean tribesman based in Babylon,3 * allied with the Medes against Assyria and founded the Neo-Babylonian empire. In order to enlist Elamite help for this enterprise, he “returned” Nanaya to Elam, where she remained. At the point of composition, the statue of Nanaya was once again missing from Uruk, and the original referent of this prophecy will have been the ill-fated Sin-sar-iskun to whom the people of Uruk were dating their documents years after Nabopolassar had seized power in Babylon.
And yet the Uruk Prophecy was still being copied in the Persian or even the Seleucid period. The virtue of prophecies is that they do not actually say that Sin-sar-iskun is going to defeat Nabopolassar, which, when it does not happen automatically, unmasks them as false prophecy. What this one does say is that when a Chaldean steals a statue from Uruk, after some suitable interval of time, hopefully not too long, a king and his son will come along and make everything right again. If that king and his son were not Assurbanipal and Sin-sar-iskun, then why not Cyrus and Cambyses or Darius and Xerxes?
To note is that the author laid out a single sequence of events in the past in the hopes of happy repetition in the future. The situation with the Dynastic Prophecy4 is a bit more complicated, and not solely due to the fragmentary nature of its preservation. In this Seleucid-period composition, the author seems to have laid out repeating sequences of events.