Archaeologists decipher ancient tablet with the inscription “A king will die”
- Scientists deciphered inscriptions on 4,000-year-old tablets, more than 100 years after their discovery.
- Omens on the tablet threaten tragedies such as famine, plague and invasion.
- Mesopotamian civilizations viewed lunar eclipses as a warning of approaching evil.
“A king will die.”
Not exactly what you’d want to read on an ancient tablet if you were superstitious. But it’s one of several omens a team of archaeologists read when they finally deciphered a collection of 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets – more than a century after their discovery.
In a recent article in Journal of Cuneiform StudiesExperts described and translated a total of 73 cuneiform omens from ancient Babylonia. Cuneiform is a logosyllabic writing system (a system in which symbols represent whole words) used by many languages of a region that roughly corresponds geographically to the modern Middle East, known as Ancient Orient.
Like many others throughout history, the authors of the tablets turned to the supernatural to predict the future. “Divination was a hallmark of the Babylonians’ attempt to understand the world,” said Andrew George, a retired Assyriologist and one of the authors of the paper Popular mechanics in an email.
The omens themselves are linked to a lunar eclipse, which was once believed to be a warning of impending doom. Ancient astronomers may have used first-hand experience to predict what the eclipses heralded, George said. Experience science live“The origin of some omens may lie in actual experiences – the observation of an omen followed by a catastrophe.”
From a modern perspective, however, “the omens reveal the typical disasters that could befall the state and tell us of the fears associated with rule and government in ancient Babylonia,” said George Popular mechanics.
The omens included threats of famine, plague, drought and even the assassination of rulers. And according to the newspaper, people in the past took these warnings very seriously.
“If the prediction associated with a particular omen was threatening, for example, ‘a king will die,’ then an oracle consultation using extispicia (an examination of the entrails of a sacrificed animal) was conducted to determine whether the king was in real danger,” George and Junko Taniguchi, the treatise’s other authors, wrote in their study.
If, after the investigation, a king’s advisers still believe that a threat exists, they will try to ward off the evil with special rituals, the newspaper says.
Although the full translations are new, knowledge of the tablets themselves is not new. The British Museum originally acquired three of the tablets in the 1890s and completed the collection with the final tablet in 1914. Soon after, the artifacts were added to a collection of over 150,000 cuneiform tablets. Due to the size of the collection and the lack of researchers in the field, the tablets were not rediscovered until the 1970s, when a scientist stumbled upon them by chance and realized their significance.
The examination of the tablets followed the standard procedure of Assyriological research: slow reading, detailed line drawings and much repetition are part of the decipherment process, according to George. The article explains that the tablets show the standard Mesopotamian divination list form. The language of the texts – Akkadian, the Semitic language of ancient Iraq – also proves that the tablets were Babylonian.
Reading the spoken and written words on cuneiform tablets can help paint an accurate picture of what life and culture might have been like 2,000 to 4,500 years ago, George says.
“In 150 years we have gone from an age in which we knew almost nothing about the Babylonians and Assyrians (only what the Greeks and the books of the Bible told us) to an age in which we have accumulated a vast knowledge of their civilization, history, religion, literature, social and economic history. All of this we have carefully reconstructed from the cuneiform texts that have been published in the meantime.”
Emma Frederickson is a student at Pace University by day and a journalist by night. She enjoys covering everything from pop culture to science to food. Her work appears in several publications, including Biography.com And Popular mechanicsWhen she’s not writing, Emma is searching for the world’s best oat milk cappuccino and moves from café to café.
