Researchers have deciphered text from four ancient Mesopotamian tablets which are roughly 4,000 years old and belonged to the former people of Mesopotamia. Perhaps surprisingly, the messages foretell prophecies of doom and misfortune rather than futuristic peace or harmony. The results were recently published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies and reported by Live Science.
The tablets were discovered over 100 years ago in what is now Iraq. Researchers believe they originated in Sippar, an ancient Babylonian city near modern-day Baghdad. They have been stored at the British Museum, though the text has only recently been translated. According to the study’s authors, Andrew George and Junko Taniguchi, the tablets “represent the oldest examples of compendia of lunar-eclipse omens yet discovered.”
The Mesopotamian people believed that “events in the sky” were messages from the gods. They would analyze eclipses, shadow movements, and the duration of day and night to determine which events might be on the horizon.
Apparently, the sky foretold nothing good. The tablets prophesise that “a king will die” and an area known as Elam (now Iran) would meet its “destruction” if “an eclipse becomes obscured from its center all at once [and] clear all at once.” The stones also predicted the “downfall” of two other regions, Subartu and Akkad, if “an eclipse begins in the south and then clears.”
Other prophecies foretold that “a large army would fall” and that there would “be an attack on the land by a locust swarm,” in additon to “losses of cattle.”
While many of these proclamations were rooted in theories rather than hard evidence, George noted that “the origins of some of the omens may have lain in actual experience—observation of portent followed by catastrophe.” Still, those incidents were likely coincidences in which cataclysmic events happened to occur around the timing of an eclipse or other significant happening.
George told Live Science that these tablets were likely used by the king’s advisors to foretell the future. “Those who advised the king kept watch on the night sky and would match their observations with the academic corpus of celestial-omen texts,” according to the study.
