INTRODUCTION

The study of signs, portents observed in the physical and social worlds indicating the will of supernatural agents and the course of future events, was undoubtedly important in all ancient cultures.

The omen lore of the third millennium B.C. must have been of oral nature, because texts recording omens do not appear in Mesopotamia until more than a millennium after the in­vention of writing.^[1] The first written samples of omen collections using the list format are attested in the texts from the Old Babylonian period onward. According to N. Veldhuis, the list as a traditional text type in Mesopotamia was put to a much wider use in that period than previously. Word lists had existed from the very beginning of cuneiform writing, but in the Old Babylonian period

... an entirely new set of lexical texts was invented and put to use in the scribal schools....

By establishing the format of knowledge text, the systematic omen recording into lists could begin. Under long processes of adding and editing, these collections grew into compendia of ominous phenomena, where segments of original observations were expanded into very comprehensive omen series, found in the archives and libraries of first-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia (see Maul 2003). These omen compendia were given both practical and theoretical value, which explains comprehensiveness of the phenomena recorded in the col­lections, as practically everything observable in the universe could have an ominous import to mortals.^{2 *} The holistic worldview of the ancient Mesopotamians assigned a firm place to every object and event in the universe according to divine will. Thus the incipit of the celestial omen series Enuma Anu Enlil suggests that the gods Anu, Enlil, and Ea themselves designed the constellations and measured the year in primeval times, thereby establishing the heavenly signs. Accordingly, Mesopotamian divination was an all-embracing semantic system designed to interpret the whole universe.³ The belief that the entire universe is causally connected is an Ionian Greek invention (Scurlock 2003: 397), but a forerunner of it is already found in the Babylonian Diviner’s Manual (ll. 38-42):

The signs on earth just as those in the sky give us signals. Sky and earth both produce portents though appearing separately. They are not separate (because) sky and earth are related.

As the divinatory texts testify, not all omens occurring in the cuneiform series were ob­served in the real world, because many examples describe phenomena that are impossible and could never occur.⁴ This indicates that simple observation and recording was complemented by theorization and systematization. The original practical purpose of omen collections was later expanded, and even superseded, by theoretical aspirations (Oppenheim 1964: 212). When every single phenomenon in the world could be considered as a possible object for recording in the spirit of examination and divinatory deduction, one can see in this attitude an early example of the encyclopaedic curiosity, which is the basis for all scientific endeavor (Bottero 1992: 127). Once an element of ominous import was uncovered, Mesopotamian scholars were able to record it extensively in hypothetically varying circumstances, sometimes creating at­tenuated and increasingly arcane sequences (Guinan 2002: 19). The format of the knowledge text endorses speculation in its own right, which comfortably steps over the boundary of the observable.⁵

The worldview represented by the omen series is not irrevocable determinism, in the sense that every event is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. The

omens revealed a conditional future, best described as a judicial decision of the gods, who gave “a verdict against the interested parties on the basis of the elements in the omen, just as each sentence by a tribunal established the future of the guilty person based upon the dossier submitted to its judgement” (Bottero 1992: 142). It is best described as an assembly of gods making decisions concerning the course of world’s affairs and the fate of human beings. In the Mesopotamian system of sign interpretation, the portent which predicted, for example, the king’s death, was not the cause of the king’s death, but only the sign for it.

It seems reasonable to insist that for ancient Mesopotamian societies the omens recorded in compendia enjoyed the status of the “laws” of the divine world order. As a consequence, the process of interpretation of a sign was understood as a performative act that empowered the interpreter, while simultaneously promoting the cosmological system upon which mantic exegesis was based (Noegel, this volume). The unique window into how everyday divination worked in a framework of royal power is provided by numerous letters and reports sent by the Neo-Assyrian scholars to the kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. The omens and other lore of the Mesopotamian scholars represented divine wisdom that ideologically originated in primeval times of the antediluvian period, but which was being continuously updated and outlined by the scientific methods of the day (Veldhuis, this volume). The omen compendia and their commentaries represented both speculative sciences and the most valuable practical means for predicting what was about to happen.⁷ The speculative and practical aspects are also present side-by-side in Mesopotamian law codes, and similar cyclic processes of omen collecting and law collecting may have applied to the creation of both kinds of compendia (see Westbrook 1985).