A Babylonian tablet which predicts future disasters has been completelydeciphered for the first time by experts.
The 4,000-year-old artifact was found more than 100 years ago in Iraq, but has only just been completely translated.
Spread across four clay tablets, it contains 61 predictions including that a ‘king will die’ and a ‘nation will fall’.
Other omens included harsh environmental disasters, including: ”In spring a locust swarm will arise and strike the crops/my land’s crops.
‘There will be a dearth of food.’
The Babylonians also predicted revolts upon the land from foreign enemies and the weather.
One translation read: ‘There will be rain and floodwater and Adad will devastate the threshing floors.
‘There will occur an attack by an Elamite army, a Gutian army, on the land. It will destroy a land that revolts. The land will perish.’
Another omen wrote: ‘As for a land that revolts, the enemy will demolish cities, city walls, my city walls, the walls of our city.’
The omens led to people taking drastic action to protect their leaders, Live Science reports.
One prediction read: ‘A king who is famous will perish; his son who has not been nominated/appointed to kingship, will seize the kingship/throne and there will be war.
‘The land will become depopulated; his cities will turn into a desolation, and his land will diminish.’
Researchers believe the predicters relied on past experiences and the lunar cycle to make their estimations.
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The ancient Babylonians linked astronomical events with natural disasters and historical events, especially lunar eclipses.
One omen read: ‘If an eclipse becomes obscured from its center all at once [and] clear all at once: a king will die, destruction of Elam.’
Another predicted two downfall of two other religions, Subartu and Akkad, if ‘an eclipse begins in the south and then clears’.
The tablets are believed to come from a city called Sippar which flourished under the nation’s empire from 1894 to 1595 BC.
The area is now modern day Iraq.
Their discovery makes the slabs the ‘oldest examples of compendia of lunar-eclipse omens yet discovered’.
It is also one of the oldest known forms of writing, as researchers tried to the decipher to ‘wedge shaped’ language.
The tablets were added to the British Museum’s collection between 1892 and 1914.
