IS THERE A BABYLONIAN THEORY OF SIGNS?

As discussed above, the material gathered into Mesopotamian omen compendia is of heterogeneous origin, and consequently different groups of omens should be interpreted with different methods.

Mesopotamian scribes never expressed general principles of sign interpretation in ab­stract terms. Only when individual and groups of omens are contrasted and compared do systematic patterns of positive and negative meaning emerge (Guinan 1998: 40). Much of the learning of the Babylonian divination priest involved technical observational knowledge, such as sectors and zones in heaven, liver, or lung. The Babylonian scholars strove to cover the range of interpretation of the signs observed there by means of systematic permutations in pairs — such as left and right, above and below — or in long rows (Oppenheim 1964: 212). Despite some transparent principles of interpretation that scholars have identified in ancient omen texts, these texts are still often quite obscure. The most difficult problems to solve in the Mesopotamian divination are the theoretic and hermeneutic principles underlying the interpretation of omen texts, namely the kind of thinking or the system of ideas that connects protasis with apodosis. As Oppenheim wrote about a half of century ago:

Only exceptionally are we able to detect any logical relationship between portent and prediction, although often we find paronomastic associations and secondary com­putations based on changes in directions of numbers. In many cases, subconscious association seems to have been at work, provoked by certain words whose specific connotations imparted to them a favorable or an unfavorable character, which in turn determined the general nature of the prediction (Oppenheim 1964: 211).

In various branches of Mesopotamian divination, some more or less universal principles apply that can easily be outlined. In general, the right side or part in Mesopotamian omen theory was considered to be related to good omens, and the left side to negative ones. Signs were divided into good, bad, and neutral. In some branches of divination, like Babylonian extispicy, signs were classified according to their intensity into stronger and weaker. Thus, a strong sign in the right side of the sacrificial animal was a favorable omen, but the same sign in the left side was unfavorable. The opposition of light and dark was also meaningful: a light color of the ominous organ conveyed favorable significance and dark color an unfavorable one. Dark color was essentially connected with the left side, and a light hue with the right side of the sacrificial animal’s parts under examination. These principles were universally applied (Starr 1983: 18-19).

It is striking, however, how often — for example, in the physiognomic omen series Alandimmu — the right side is ill-omened and the left side favorable, and cases also exist where both sides are equally good or bad. Why is the usual pattern reversed? J. Scurlock suggests:

... there are in fact four types of signs, those that are good (and therefore good on either side, although usually somewhat less good on the left), those that are bad (and therefore bad on either side, although usually somewhat less bad on the right), those that are neutral (and become good only when placed on the right, and bad only when placed on the left), and those that are bad but not irreversibly so (that is, they are bad when placed on the right, but are transformed into good when placed on the left) (Scurlock 2003: 398).

The opposition of “right” and “left” is observed differently in omen texts and in scientific handbooks. In the scientific compendia, the signs are observed from the observer’s point of view. In the physiognomic omen text Alandimmu, the “right” and “left” of the body of the observed human being is measured from the client’s point of view, but in the diagnostic series Sakikku signs are influenced in a good or bad direction from the physician’s, not the patient’s, point of view:

It follows that neutral signs are good on the observer’s left (which would be ob­served’s right) and bad on the observer’s right, which would be the observed’s left — apparently an inverted pattern but actually normal for Alamdimmu.

Thus even the notions of “right” and “left” are not without difficulties and complexities in the knowledge texts. Ambivalences of reading the signs differently in different lights and contexts are deliberately used by the Babylonian diviners (Heeßel, this volume). This also applies to the medium of writing, because most of the cuneiform signs are polyphonous, and a different reading of the sign used in protasis could provide its interpretation in apodosis, thus creates a meaningful protasis-apodosis string (Frahm, this volume). The hermeneutical method of giving speculative Akkadian values to Sumerian logograms is well attested in Babylonian philology, most notably in the last two tablets of the Babylonian Creation Epic (Bottero 1992: 87-102).

Puns and wordplays also played a role in omen interpretation. Thus the Assyrian Dream­Book says: “If a man dreams that he is eating a raven (aribu), he will have income (irbu). If a man dreams he is eating human flesh (sèru), he will have great riches (sarù)” Such word­plays are also used in explaining dreams in the Babylonian Talmud and in the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus Daldianus (Noegel 2002: 168-69). Rhyming or juxtaposition of similarly sounding words in oracular couplets was a well-known practice of divination in early China. The verbal methods of divination may easily become linked to poetry, in which an arousal of one poetic image, drawn usually from the animal or botanical world in China, associa­tively prepares the ground for another image that describes an event in the human world (Shaugnessy, this volume).