THE SOCIAL SUPPORT OF DIVINATION
Various Mesopotamian sources demonstrate that every method foretelling future events — divination, oracles, and dreams — was fully validated socially, both on popular and scholarly levels.
Questions asked by private persons are frequent in some corpuses, for example, in tamitu questions,15 16 and prophets could be consulted in private at the temple of Istar in Nimrud as a letter of an exorcist shows.16 When confidence in asutu or asiputu was fading away, divination about health was an easy way out and was quite common among private persons17 and among members of the royal family.18The faith of the society in the legitimacy of signs was so strong that their utterance had the authority of official statements. Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty states that any improper word heard from the mouth of a prophet (LU.ra-gi-me), of an ecstatic (LU.mah-he-e), or of an inquirer of oracles (LU.sa-’i-li a-mat DINGIR) should not be concealed from the king.19 A prophecy against the king could thus be interpreted as a plot by the people, as these prophets were seldom uttering alone, but preferably in public places where people would hear the prophecy. According to S. Parpola, an oracle delivered by La-dagil-ili was meant to “impress
on the audience the divine support for Esarhaddon’s kingship,”20 since his accession was controversial.
Some officials were supposed to report prophecies21 and signs to the palace. Letters from priests inform the king about anomalies in offering animals, for example, priests mentioning a missing kidney in a sheep22 or sending to the palace an abnormal kidney for inspection by the royal scholars.23 Mar-Issar, the Assyrian emissary in Babylon, reports24 that at the end of the performance of the substitute king ritual, a prophetess (raggintu) said that the son of Damqi (the substitute king) would take over kingship and that she had revealed the “thieving polecat(?),” probably referring to the king’s opponents.25 This prophecy, and the fact that Damqi is of noble origin, frighten the people in Babylonia, but Mar-Issar tells the king he is confident since the apotropaic rituals (namburbi) were appropriately performed. However, as Mar-Issar writes, it would be preferable for the king not to go out until the threat of the eclipse still ensues for 100 days, and to have a substitute for the king’s cultic duties.