1.0 HISTORICISM AND A “CREATED” OLD BABYLONIAN DIVINATORY LITERATURE
A number of postulates about Mesopotamian divination and divinatory literature rest uncomfortably together, even though they are by now standard equippage in Assyriological discussions.
There is a general, but not exclusive, sense that divinatory literature first arose in the Old Babylonian period. This idea does not preclude the possibility or even probability, for some scholars, that the Old Babylonian texts drew on earlier traditions or an oral background. There is the further idea that the divinatory arts in ancient Mesopotamia constituted a “scientific” form of inquiry or discourse, or stood in an analogous cultural position. Of all the formal devices divinatory literature deployed and which puzzle scholars, the largest — really the meta-device — was that omens were ever written down in the first place. Yet it is this topic which has received the least attention, and probably for the very good reason that this event or process is not visible in any textual precipitate.Still, this entextualization is a change in both composition and praxis, and it is to these changes that this essay turns its attention. I argue (section 2.0) that our understanding of ex- tispicy should assume the deliberate composition of the compendious texts (manuals) without prior written source material, and not any continuous, scholarly transmission of observational forerunners. The hodgepodge of evidence that is often used to discuss early extispicy can be shown to be either a) not extispicy, or b) extispicy, but not emphatically non-textual. The importance of this argument is that the moment of this literature’s composition must be understood (section 3.0) in a wholly other context, in the political crises that afflicted the age of its creation. The Old Babylonian period, Mesopotamia’s own “Warring States” epoch, was a time in which many third-millennium cultural forms were being transformed by programmatic revision and political appropriation in the contest to restore geopolitical equilibrium. Extispicy was just such a revolution.
Pongratz-Leisten, Gertrud Farber, Seth Sanders, Eva Von Dassow, Ann Guinan, Eckart Frahm, Nils Heeßel, Ulla Koch, Martti Nissinen, Francesca Rochberg, Abraham Winitzer, and Amar Annus for his work in organizing the seminar. None of them is responsible for the opinions or errors herein, which are mine alone.
SETH F. C. RICHARDSON