Deciphering cuneiform tablets found in Iraq.. What secrets do they hold?

The tablets, which were added to the British Museum’s collection several decades ago, describe how certain lunar eclipses herald death, destruction and plague.

“The four clay tablets represent the oldest examples of a set of lunar eclipse signs yet discovered,” Andrew George, emeritus professor of Babylonian language at the University of London, and Junko Taniguchi, an independent researcher, wrote in a paper recently published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.

The authors of the tablets used the time of night, the movement of shadows, and the date and duration of eclipses to predict signs.

For example, one sign says that if “the eclipse disappears from its center at once and is revealed at once: a king will die, and Elam will perish.” Elam was a region of Mesopotamia located in what is now Iran.

Another sign says that if “the eclipse began in the south and then disappeared: the fall of Subartu and Akkad,” which were two regions of Mesopotamia at that time.

Another sign says: “An eclipse in the evening hour: indicates a plague.”

It is likely that ancient astrologers used past experiences to help determine the signs that eclipses portend.

“Some of the signs may have their origins in actual experience, where observing a portent is followed by disaster,” George told Live Science in an email. However, he noted that most of the signs were likely identified through a theoretical system that linked eclipse characteristics to different signs.

The cuneiform tablets probably came from Sippar, a city that flourished in what is now Iraq, George told Live Science.

At the time the tablets were written, the Babylonian Empire flourished in parts of the region. The tablets became part of the British Museum collection between 1892 and 1914, but have not been fully translated and published until now.

trying to predict the future

In Babylon and other parts of Mesopotamia, there was a strong belief that celestial events could predict the future.

People believed that “events in the sky were coded signs placed there by the gods as warnings about future prospects for those on Earth,” according to George and Taniguchi.

“Those who advised the king kept watching the night sky and matching their observations with the corpus of academic texts that predicted celestial omens,” they added.

The kings of ancient Mesopotamia did not rely on these heavenly omens alone to predict what was to come, as the researchers explained: “If the prediction associated with a particular omen posed a threat, for example the death of the king, this was investigated by examining the entrails of animals to determine whether the king was in real danger. If the entrails of the animals indicated danger, people believed that they could perform certain rituals that could cancel out the bad omen, and thus confront the evil forces behind it.”

Source: Live Science