Researchers have finally deciphered a series of 4,000-year-old Babylonian tablets – and the messages are not about bright hopes for the future, but almost exclusively about death, doom and darkness.
The four clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script predict the death of kings and the fall of civilizations, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.
The ancient artifacts were discovered over 100 years ago in what is now Iraq and are part of the British Museum’s collection, but have only now been translated into a modern language.
The divination of the peoples of southern Mesopotamia was based on the movement of the moon, especially on lunar eclipses, when the moon passes behind the shadow of the earth.
They “represent the oldest examples of compendia of lunar eclipse omnids yet discovered,” write the report’s authors, Andrew George and Junko Taniguchi.
The Babylonians analyzed the eclipses by time, shadow movement, duration and date and then used this data to predict various events, according to the study.
They believed that “events in the sky” were signs from the gods warning of the future of earthbound peoples and rulers.
Among the omens engraved on the tablets are “a king will die, destruction of Elam,” an area in Mesopotamia in modern-day Iran, when “a solar eclipse will obscure its center at once and dissolve it at once,” Live Science reported.
Another predicts the “fall of Subartu and Akkad,” two other regions of time, when “a solar eclipse begins in the south and then disappears.”
Other worrying omens include: “The country will be attacked by a plague of locusts,” “livestock losses will occur,” and “a large army will fall.”
Some of these omens may be based on previously observed coincidences between the timing of various eclipses and important events, says George, emeritus professor of Babylonian philology at the University of London.
“The origin of some of these omens may lie in actual experiences – the observation of an omen followed by a catastrophe,” he told Live Science.
However, most of them were probably based on theories rather than real evidence.
According to the professor, the tablets probably come from Sippar, an ancient Babylonian city southwest of present-day Baghdad.
They were used by the king’s advisors to predict future events.
“Those who advised the king observed the night sky and compared their observations with the scientific corpus of texts on celestial omens,” the authors write in the study.
To get a second opinion on the likelihood of the omens coming true, the advisers examined the entrails of the sacrificed animals “to determine whether the king was in real danger,” the researchers said.
They also performed rituals to ward off bad omens and prevent predictions from coming true, George and Taniguchi wrote.
Or, according to NASA, the Babylonians appointed a substitute king before the impending danger, who would have to bear the brunt of the gods’ wrath – and would eventually be killed – while the real king remained unharmed.
The Babylonian astronomers succeeded in predicting lunar eclipses “with considerable accuracy,” the space agency noted.
This discovery came shortly after the collapse of two ancient North American structures within just nine days – a pyramid in the Ihuatzio archaeological zone in the Mexican state of Michoacán and the Double Arch in Utah.
But according to members of the Purépecha tribe, there is a more supernatural explanation.
“For our ancestors, the builders, this was a bad omen, indicating the proximity of an important event,” Tariakuiri Alvarez told The US Sun.
