Scholars deciphered inscriptions on 4,000-year-old tablets more than 100 years after they were originally discovered.<\/p>\n
Omens on the tablet threaten tragedies including famines, plagues, and invasions.<\/p>\n
Mesopotamian civilizations used to view lunar eclipses as warnings for oncoming evil.<\/p>\n
This story is a collaboration with Biography.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cA king<\/a> will die.\u201d<\/p>\n Not the exact thing you want to read on an ancient tablet if you happen to be any sort of superstitious. But it\u2019s one of several omens<\/a> that a group of archaeologists read when they finally deciphered a collection of 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets\u2014over a century after they were discovered.<\/p>\n In a paper published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies<\/a>, experts described and translated a total of 73 cuneiform omens originating from ancient Babylonia. Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system (a system where symbols<\/a> represent entire words) used by many languages of a region that roughly aligns geographically with the modern Middle East known as the Ancient Near East<\/a>.<\/p>\n Like many others throughout history, the authors of the tablets turned to the supernatural to predict the future<\/a>. \u201cDivination was a hallmark of the Babylonians\u2019 attempt to understand the world,\u201d Andrew George<\/a>, a retired Assyriologist and one of the authors of the paper, told Popular Mechanics in an email.<\/p>\n The omens themselves are tied to a lunar eclipse, which were once believed to warn about oncoming evils. Ancient astronomers<\/a> may have used first hand experiences to predict what the eclipses foreshadowed, George told Live Science<\/a>. \u201cThe origins of some of the omens may have lain in actual experience\u2014observation of portent followed by catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n From a modern perspective, however, \u201cthe omens reveal the typical disasters<\/a> that could happen to the state and tell us about the anxieties that [were] attached to rulership and governance in ancient Babylonia,\u201d George told Popular Mechanics.<\/p>\n Included in the omens were threats of famine, plague<\/a>, drought, and even assassinations of leaders. And according to the paper, people of the past took these warnings very seriously.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the prediction associated with a given omen was threatening, for example, \u2018a king will die,\u2019 then an oracular enquiry by extispicy [an examination of a sacrificed animal\u2019s<\/a> innards] was conducted to determine whether the king was in real danger,\u201d George and Junko Taniguchi, the other author of the paper, wrote in their study.<\/p>\n If a king\u2019s advisors still felt that there was a threat after the examination, they would attempt to ward off evil with special rituals<\/a>, the paper explained.<\/p>\n Although the complete translations are new, knowledge of the tablets themselves is not. The British Museum<\/a> originally acquired three of the tablets in the 1890s, and completed the set with the final tablet in 1914. Soon after, the artifacts joined a collection of over 150,000 cuneiform tablets. Because of the scale of the collection and the lack of researchers in the field, the tablets were only rediscovered when a scholar happened to stumble upon them and realize their significance in the 1970s.<\/p>\n Studies on the tablets followed standard procedure for Assyriological research: slow reading, detailed line-drawings, and lots of repetition are all parts of the deciphering process, according to George. The paper explains that the tablets take the standard Mesopotamian divinatory list form. The language<\/a> of the texts\u2014Akkadian, the Semitic language of ancient Iraq\u2014also proves that the tablets were Baylonian.<\/p>\n Reading the spoken and written word inscribed on cuneiform tablets can help create an accurate picture of what life and culture<\/a> may have looked like 2,000 to 4,500 years ago, according to George.<\/p>\n \u201cIn 150 years we have progressed from knowing almost nothing about the Babylonians and Assyrians (only what the Greeks and Biblical books told us),\u201d he wrote, \u201cto accumulating a great mountain of knowledge of their civilization, its history, religion<\/a>, literature, social and economic history, all painstakingly reconstructed from those cuneiform texts which have been published in the interim.\u201d<\/p>\n You Might Also Like<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scholars deciphered inscriptions on 4,000-year-old tablets more than 100 years after they were originally discovered. 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