A 4,000-year-old clay tablet has been deciphered and it has been revealed that it describes a 'misfortune that is a harbinger of a lunar eclipse'
Deciphering a 4,000-year-old clay tablet found in what is now Iraq has revealed that it contains inscriptions about calamities such as the death of a king, the fall of a city, and plague, all of which are omens of a lunar eclipse.
Old Babylonian Lunar-Eclipse Omen Tablets in the British Museum: Journal of Cuneiform Studies: Vol 76
'A king will die': 4,000-year-old lunar eclipse omen tablets finally deciphered | Live Science
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/a-king-will-die-4-000-year-old-lunar-eclipse-omen-tablets-finally-deciphered
This time, a research team led by Andrew George , Professor Emeritus of Babylonian at the University of London, investigated four clay tablets excavated from the ancient city of Sippar , which was located in Baghdad Province, Iraq. Sippar has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years and has long flourished as an important Babylonian religious city, from which a large number of clay tablets have been excavated.
The tablet is thought to date back to the Old Babylonian period , about 4,000 years ago, and was part of the British Museum's collection between 1892 and 1914, but its cuneiform inscriptions had never been deciphered until now.
After deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions, it was discovered that the clay tablets contained descriptions of 'misfortunes that were presaged by a lunar eclipse.' The misfortunes that occurred after a lunar eclipse varied depending on the time of the eclipse, the place where it occurred, and the appearance of the eclipse.
For example, one passage read, 'In the case of a lunar eclipse in which the moon disappears from the center of the sky all at once and then clears all at once: the king will die and
Another passage reads, 'If an eclipse begins in the south and then clears: Subartu and Akkad will fall,' and another: 'A lunar eclipse seen in the evening: a sign of plague.'
'Some of these omens may have been based on actual experiences, where lunar eclipses were observed following major catastrophes,' George said, but most were more likely determined by theoretical systems linking the characteristics of lunar eclipses to various phenomena.
In Babylonia and ancient Mesopotamia, events in the sky were believed to be hidden signs from the gods, who were then warning people on earth. 'The king's advisers kept watch over the night sky and compared their observations with scholarly astronomical texts,' the team wrote in their paper.
If an astronomical event was a sign of a bad luck event, such as the death of a king, people would use a method of divination called 'extispicy' using animal entrails to determine whether the king was really in danger. Even if extispicy revealed that a bad luck event was approaching, it was believed that it could be avoided by performing certain rituals, the research team said in their paper.
Related Posts:
in Note, Posted by log1h_ik